


A Dream in Stone

by XiuChen4Ever



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: 18th Century, Addiction, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst with a Happy Ending, China, Chronic Illness, Discussions of Suicide, Infidelity, Love Triangle, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-02-13 08:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21491494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XiuChen4Ever/pseuds/XiuChen4Ever
Summary: The chronic pain of his illness is hard enough to endure, but failing to get well for the sake of his lover is what’s truly killing Minseok.
Relationships: Kim Jongdae | Chen/Kim Minseok | Xiumin, Kim Minseok | Xiumin/Lu Han
Comments: 10
Kudos: 68
Collections: EXO-M Fic Fest R2





	1. Jade

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is the first time I have ever tried to be historically accurate, and it will likely be the last. I tried my best to research 18th century China, but most sources wanted to tell me about Imperials or warriors, not average merchant-class people. So I do apologize for any inaccuracies that may have slipped through.
> 
> **This fic involves a love triangle and it does NOT end with poly.** Everyone does get a happy ending of one kind or another, but if you're the kind of reader that must know who the endgame couple is up front, there's a spoiler to that regard in the last chapter's end notes.
> 
> Thanks so much to the mods for another awesome round!

#  Prologue: Jade

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Minseok is beautiful. 

That’s all Lu Han can think whenever he catches sight of his lover, no matter if it’s for the first time that day or the hundredth. Minseok is simply breathtaking, those big eyes angled cat-like in that perfectly heart-shaped face, his adorable pouty lips, the proportions of his body, the graceful way he moves. He’s just so elegant, and that’s what Lu Han calls him, nicknaming his lover in his own native tongue.

Xiumin. Beautiful, elegant, graceful jade. Precious beyond measure. The one true love of Lu Han’s life.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Xiumin says in his charming Joseon accent, smooth alabaster cheeks now brushed with pink.

“I can’t help it,” Lu Han laughs. “You’re captivating.”

But instead of laughing off his cheesiness like usual, shoving at his shoulder, coming back at Lu Han about his own doe-like eyes and refined chin, Xiumin just blinks down at his bowl of makgeolli, swirling the cloudy white liquor absently.

“I hope you always remember me like this, even when I’m… When I’m not beautiful anymore,” Xiumin says, lifting those expressive eyes to study Lu Han’s face.

He’s not teasing, playing around, fishing for compliments. He looks scared and sad and Lu Han’s arms instinctively wrap tight around his lover’s broad shoulders, currently rounded, small, vulnerable.

“Darling,” Lu Han says, pressing kisses to Xiumin’s hair. “You will always be beautiful to me, even when we’re old and gray.”

“What if I don’t get old?” Xiumin mumbles into Lu Han’s shoulder. “What if… what if I just turn gray?”

Lu Han can practically feel his heart stop. Time freezes behind his closed eyelids and he holds his breath, desperate to keep it from once again marching on its inexorable course.

But no, this can’t be. It’s merely Lu Han’s apothecary training that’s making his mind leap to the worst possible conclusion.

“Did you find a gray hair already?” Lu Han asks, striving for a playful tone.

Xiumin shakes his head. “A stoneblossom,” he almost whispers. “On my ankle.”

“Oh, Min.” Tears threaten but Lu Han blinks them away, squeezing his Xiumin tighter. “Don’t you worry, my love. I’ll fix it. The gray agony can’t take you from me. I’ll find a cure.”

“There isn’t a cure,” Xiumin sighs, straightening up to take another swallow of his makgeolli. “And everybody dies. I’ll just do so sooner than most.”

_ No! _ Lu Han’s chest tightens as if his heart is in a vice. As an apothecary, he strives to triumph over all the body’s ills, but in the face of the always-lethal disease that drains color from skin, twists bones and teeth, wracks the body with the pain of distortion and the mind with the pain of disfigurement, it is all too understandable to put a stop to the suffering. Lu Han himself has even provided such an agent of mercy more than once.

But he could never be the angel of death for his precious, precious Xiumin. Nor could he allow anyone else to rob him of his only love.

Terrified, Lu Han shakes his head until he finds his voice. “Promise me, Min,” he begs. “Promise you won’t end yourself. You can’t give up—I’ll make a promise, too.”

He twines his fingers into Xiumin’s and gazes earnestly into those beautiful cat-like eyes. “I will find you a cure, Min. No matter how much it costs or how long it takes. I’m not losing my beautiful jade.”

Xiumin gives him half a smile.

“So you promise me, Kim Minseok. Promise me that you won’t give up on yourself. We can beat this. I won’t rest until you’re cured, okay? Promise me.”

Those full lips press together, thinning out into a bloodless line.

“Promise me,” Lu Han insists, shaking their clasped hands a little.

Minseok blinks down at the ceramic bowl of spirits in his hands, then lifts his eyes to meet Lu Han’s beseeching gaze.

“I promise, Lu Han. I won’t give up on myself.”

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	2. Serpentine

#  Chapter One: Serpentine

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There is nothing Minseok hates more than his own reflection.

He avoids it as much as possible, shies away from looking at his own body, the way he moves, his skin. He rushes through cleaning his teeth, washing his face—as if it matters anymore—and bathing himself. The pain of seeing the signs of the disease that’s killing him is greater than the pain of the disease itself.

But every morning, Minseok forces himself to stare into the polished silver of the mirror. To take stock. To clinically evaluate if the whites of his eyes are less yellow. If the graying of his skin has reversed at all. If his teeth seem less pronounced. If the knobby growths just below his hairline are receding.

He twists to see if his vertebrae are protruding less. He lifts his arms over his head to see if his range of motion has improved. He stands, eyes closed, his own pulse throbbing in his ears, to evaluate his pain level.

Every morning, he opens his eyes again to see Lu Han’s worried face, turned a little sideways so Minseok’s tragic appearance doesn’t shatter his lover’s everything-will-be-fine attitude. Every morning, Lu Han’s voice is a hopeful whisper.

“Is it working?”

Every morning, Minseok shakes his head before remembering that Lu Han’s not looking at him. That Lu Han  _ can’t  _ look at him unless Minseok is fully clothed, head hooded, face shadowed. That the apothecary is unable to confront the bared evidence of his continuing failure to fulfill the promise he made three years ago now. 

Minseok doesn’t blame Lu Han for either his continuing illness or his lover’s inability to cope with the sight of the face he used to gaze adoringly at until Minseok’s blush rose to his ears and he shoved the laughing man away. Lu Han does his best, works the hardest, frays his own good health in his efforts to restore Minseok’s.

But every morning, Minseok still answers, “No.”

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The afternoons are better. Minseok can wrap his distorted body in one of the beautiful silk robes given to him what feels like a lifetime ago by a very earnest Lu Han, trying to impress the Joseon he fancied. With the colorful fabric hiding his infirmity and his face shadowed by the engulfing hood, Minseok can sit quietly near Lu Han as he works, listening to his lover humming absently as he weighs and measures ingredients and mixes up remedies for his customers.

Minseok can always tell from Lu Han’s silence when he shifts to formulating another experimental remedy for the Joseon he brought home and promised to cure.

Lu Han is the best apothecary in Beijing. Perhaps in all of Zhōngguó. And he’s in touch with doctors and men of medicine from all over the known world. If he hasn’t been able to find a cure, if he hasn’t been able to reverse the course of the disease, no one can. It’s no small miracle that he’s even been able to slow the progression down as much as he has.

But it’s been three years. Three years of drinking an elixir every evening before bed, a bed that he sleeps in alone ever since Lu Han rolled over once and sleepily wrapped an arm around Minseok only to awaken with a yelp at the misshapen body beneath his palm. Minseok had been unoffended by Lu Han’s sheepish request to move to his own pallet even though the apothecary had been full of apologies. It’s not Lu Han’s fault the beautiful man with whom he’d once loved to share a bed is now a creature warped by disease into something easily mistakable for a nightmare made flesh.

And it’s not Lu Han’s fault that gray agony remains incurable.

It is Lu Han’s fault that Minseok remains alive, though. And it’s Minseok’s own choice to refuse all pain medications in the theory that they might interfere with any potential treatment. Still, he’s lived far longer post diagnosis than any other gray agony patient ever known. And he’ll continue to do so until the disease itself finally kills him, unlike any other gray agony patient ever known. Minseok is a man who keeps his promises. And he forgives Lu Han for being unable to keep his.

Minseok knew from the beginning he wouldn’t be able to.

But Minseok loves Lu Han, so he stays. He endures the pain with a smile, even if it’s sometimes more like lips drawn back around clenched teeth. He sits in the corner of the workroom, hooded, nearly motionless, and he listens to Lu Han sing. And he closes his eyes and takes himself back to a time when Lu Han was his lover in more than name, when the man he adores was eager to touch his body, to take pleasure in him, to kiss him, to hold him close. 

He doesn’t blame Lu Han for not being able to touch him at all anymore. If anything, he blames himself for stepping into the contaminated pond with a tiny cut on his ankle, even though he knows it’s ridiculous. The pond hadn’t been marked as dangerous. He hadn’t known he’d somehow scratched his ankle. He’d immersed a single sandaled foot to snag a runaway hat for a grateful farmer, and in doing so had probably doomed them both.

There was no way he could have known. There had been people swimming in the pond. Children. It had been a sunny day, and their laughter had filled the air like flutters of butterflies.

Sometimes death looks an awful lot like life. But death it had been.

Two days later, the cut Minseok hadn’t known existed became pale and itchy. Two days after that, Minseok couldn’t deny what it had become. A stoneblossom, patchy gray harbinger of the agony yet to come.

There are some men of medicine that would have advocated amputating his leg as soon as the blossom had made itself known, but Lu Han had known better. That by the time the stoneblossom blooms, the disease has thoroughly corrupted the blood. So at least Minseok’s slightly better off than the cripples begging by the city gates, gleaning what few coins are tossed at them to buy the treatments necessary to extend their lives, growing skeletally thin as they prioritize medicine over food.

The cripples that inevitably throw themselves beneath a wagon’s wheels or a horse’s hooves when the constant searing pain overrides the fear of death.

Many of the afflicted don’t even wait that long. When the stoneblossom appears, they put their affairs in order. When the apothecary is called, it’s not to make an elixir to prolong life. It’s to make a tincture to provide death.

Minseok had been resigned to that, initially. Had trusted that his lover would tearfully bestow a painless sleep from which he’d never wake up. But Lu Han is stubborn, and he’d been deeply in love. He’d begged his Xiumin to stay with him, so here Minseok is, unworthy of the pet name any longer. Unworthy of his lover’s adoration. Still alive due to a mutual sense of obligation.

Breaking his word is not an option for either man. And so they remain in this drawn-out death spiral, one increasingly frantic to prevent progression, one increasingly welcoming of the inevitable end.

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The nights are the worst. The pain is always most intense after sundown despite the increasing potency of the elixirs Lu Han formulates. Some nights are so bad all Minseok can do is lay on his pallet and cry as soundlessly as possible to avoid disturbing the rest Lu Han needs to perform his job well the next day. 

Lu Han offers to include a soporific, a painkiller, a dissociative in his formulations every evening. Every evening Minseok refuses, determined to endure what he must to give the elixirs the best possible chance of working.

But more and more often, late in the night, his body screams for mercy. The agony for which the disease is named becomes overwhelming, and Minseok curses his accumulated second-hand herbal knowledge. He knows in which drawer the monkshood, the cinnabar are kept. He knows how much he’d need to chew with oversized teeth to permanently end his suffering. And he knows that if he lies there in the acrid marinade of his own sweat long enough, that he won’t be able to resist.

On nights like this, Minseok forces himself onto feet that feel on fire. He wraps a black hooded robe over skin that crawls with lightning. He slips silently from the spartan quarters above the tidy apothecary shop, and he staggers, like a man already drunk, to the local liquor house.

He knows that alcohol, while numbing his pain, will likely hasten his demise. But on nights like this, Minseok can’t bring himself to care. He may have promised not to give up on himself, but he is only human after all. He won’t actively seek his own end, but he’s not particularly sorry to see it looming ever nearer.

The liquor master knows Minseok by now. Or rather, he knows the silent man in the hood that wordlessly stacks coins atop the most secluded table in exchange for a jar of huangjiu and a cup from which to drink the tea-colored liquor. At first Minseok had been desperate to hide his true identity so as not to shame the apothecary working so hard to save him. Many men enslaved by alcohol hide their shame beneath a hood. Many late-night drinkers are taciturn, asocial, wanting nothing more than to nurse a drink and ignore the world. 

But men blinded by pain aren’t always able to be discreet. And drunk men, giddy with pain’s ease, are even less so.

So Minseok strongly suspects the liquor master knows. As he sits at the darkest table, hunched over the drink that numbs his body and cushions his mind, Minseok prays for blessings on the man and his entire family. Without the benefit of a medical background, most people assume the gray agony is spread via casual contact. That even sharing space with an afflicted person is dangerous. 

So as his pain becomes less and less endurable, Minseok’s gratitude for the liquor master’s mercy grows. His gratitude that the man only nods to Minseok, takes down a cup that sits alone on a top shelf, unseals a jar of liquor, and sets both before him without question. That he knocks Minseok’s cash into a rice bowl with the end of a chopstick. That he waits to scrub down the corner table and burn cleansing incense over it until after Minseok leaves.

It probably helps that Minseok pays three times the going rate and he’s swapped out the high-class but low-strength huangjiu for the more potent (and more expensive) baijiu. But on nights when his options seem limited to drunkenness or death, the diseased man is still glad to be extorted instead of excluded.

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Tonight, Minseok halts in the doorway of the liquor house, body both burning and frozen. There’s someone in his usual seat. Someone whose hooded face contrasts with his lively voice. Someone joking with the liquor master, someone whose baritone lifts into a boyish whine when he’s told the proprietor won’t open the last jar of baijiu for him.

Someone whose head lifts along with the liquor master’s when Minseok’s pain-weakened limbs give out and his shoulder collides with the doorframe in an effort to hold himself upright.

“Ah, see,” the liquor master says. “You would have me sell you for amusement what this man buys from desperation.” 

The man’s deep voice holds a faint trace of a Joseon accent, the reason Minseok drags himself an extra block to imbibe here rather than a closer liquor house. His accent sounds like home, the place Minseok had lived blissfully with his handsome foreign lover, the place where he’d been happy. Carefree. Painless.

This echo of his mother tongue is comfort enough that Minseok obeys when the stranger gestures to the open seat across the table.

“Are you one for the harder stuff, too, friend?” the stranger asks. His expressive voice holds more prominent hints of the less-musical language Minseok hasn’t spoken in years.

The urge to flee and the urge to melt into this reassuring sound briefly war within his chest, but the thought of dragging himself home without the balm of alcohol to stand between him and eternity pushes him toward the empty stool.

The stranger’s hood is still tilted at him expectantly, so Minseok offers a single curt nod as he sits. 

“Such a small world we find ourselves in.”

Minseok stifles a snort. His world is tiny indeed, limited to the rooms above the apothecary shop and this very liquor house. He’s relieved when the liquor master pours a cup of the freshly-unsealed baijiu and sets both cup and jar in front of him, so he drops an extra coin onto the tabletop before wrapping his sleeve-engulfed hands around the brimming vessel.

The stranger is silent as the liquor master collects the coins and Minseok raises the cup to slurp the contents beneath his hood.

“Rough night?”

Minseok sets the cup back against the polished rosewood tabletop without offering any response.

Evidently the stranger doesn’t need one. “I’ve been there. Sorry for trying to coax our Canlie to pour me your reserves.”

Minseok sips again, letting the burn of the liquor herald the dousing of his pain. He hasn’t talked to anyone but Lu Han in years. He doesn’t even talk to Lu Han that much anymore, just listens to the voice of the man he loves.

It’s surreal to have any other voice directed at his ears.

Undaunted by his continuing silence, the stranger’s friendly chatter continues. “I haven’t had good baijiu in a long time. It must be nice to be able to come here knowing Canlie has saved you a jar of the best.”

Another swallow of said taste sears its way down Minseok’s throat.

“I’m Zhongda, by the way, but most people call me Chen.”

The stranger waits out the silence, and despite the hoods over both of their heads Minseok feels incredibly  _ observed. _

“I’m… Min,” he finally responds, using the single syllable shared between the name his mother gave him and the name his lover once called him. The hanja his mother had chosen for him means  _ jade _ as far as a Joseon is concerned, but in this country it means far less. The proper word for jade in Zhōngguó is  _ yù. Mín _ merely indicates a jade-like stone, inferior, un-imperial, unvaluable. Just a gray-green rock. 

Fitting, since that’s what he’s become.

“Nice to meet you, Min.” 

The stranger offers a bow. Minseok awkwardly reciprocates, then drinks again. A large mouthful, swallowed slowly, eyes closed beneath his hood as he feels the fire of the liquid diffuse into something soft and warm inside him, gently heating his stony soul as it dampers the flames of pain in his body. An even trade. Maintenance of balance.

“I see you’re not much of a talker. Does my chatter disturb your peace?”

Minseok shakes his head. It’s surprisingly nice, actually. The pitch and cadence of this Chen’s voice is far different from Lu Han’s. It’s rolling, the ebb and flow not unlike that of the sea separating the peninsula he was born on from the mainland that is now his home. The rhythm lulls him, and he finds himself slumped against the pillow of his crooked arm much sooner than usual. Sleep, and the sanctuary it offers, tugs at his mind.

Forcing himself onto reluctant feet for the second time that night, Minseok drops a few more coins on the table before staggering home, tipsy but blissfully pain-dulled.

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	3. Shale

#  Chapter Two: Shale

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Chen is at the liquor house again the following night. And two nights after that. And the next three nights in a row. Despite Lu Han’s excitement at finding a new, pure source of thunder god vine, the pain has never been worse. Minseok finds himself at the liquor house most nights, tear-streaked gray cheeks hidden beneath his hood. And whenever he stumbles through the doorway toward his temporary salvation, Chen is always waiting.

Not only that, but Chen always seems delighted to see Minseok. He welcomes him to his usual spot by name, calls out to the liquor master Min’s usual order. And the cheerful man always maintains a steady stream of one-sided conversation, occasionally drawing the liquor master in for a comment or two. It’s more intoxicating than the baijiu in his cup, to be engulfed by such easy camaraderie, to feel so included without having to actually participate. 

Except he does participate, single-word interjections growing into brief sentences, opinions and reactions drawn out of him by Chen’s relaxed amiability like Lu Han’s infusors draw the essence from his ingredients. Chen seems delighted at this, leaving more and more room in the conversation for Minseok to fill, reacting to his words with consideration and the occasional clink of porcelain on porcelain.

Both men remain entirely hidden beneath robes and hoods. Yet somehow, for the first time in a long time, Minseok feels truly  _ seen. _ He feels like a valued contributor to something outside of his own mind, even if it’s just a quiet conversation in a modest liquor house. He’s not a victim or a patient or a test subject. He’s appreciated, not pitied. His presence is anticipated, not ignored.

Minseok’s pain grows louder and louder every day, haunting him while he haunts his own home, a shapeless silken ghost disintegrating into jagged fragments beneath his own smothered screams. But Chen’s voice cuts through the agony like birdsong before a waterfall, not overriding the pain but flickering on top of it like lightning over a cloud-covered sky.

The pain is still there. But now it’s not alone. It’s not the only thing Minseok has to anticipate every evening. It’s not the only note in the droning dirge of his life. His body is still wracked with crushing agony that makes it hard to breathe. But the vibrant melody of Chen’s attention is there nonetheless, and when his promise to Lu Han tastes like ash in his throat, that melody is the tether to which the dying man clings.

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Despite Lu Han’s enthusiasm about adding the powder of an exotic variety of wu gong to Minseok’s elixir one night, eyes wide and full of renewed hope, the pain gets so bad that Minseok’s eyes refuse to stop watering even after the first cup of baijiu is emptied and refilled by shaking, sleeve-covered hands. All Minseok can do as he waits for the numbness to kick in is watch the droplets dripping from his pointed chin as they splatter against the tabletop.

“Ah, let’s not make a bigger mess for our Canlie to clean up,” a gentle voice rumbles from beside him. 

The cuff of a sleeve wipes the fallen tears from the polished rosewood before dabbing at Minseok’s chin. The unexpected touch causes Minseok to rear back a little, enough to see the fingers folding the cloth against his face.

They’re entirely gray.

Minseok yelps, flailing backward so hard he tips the stool over with him to hit the polished wooden floor with a clatter and a grunt that melts into a whimper. He curls around himself, retreating entirely into the enveloping fabric of the hooded robe like a turtle into its shell, more whimpers threaded through his panting, pulse galloping in his ears.

“Shh, Min, it’s okay. Don’t panic. You’re all right. And so am I.” 

Chen’s voice is low, soothing, thrumming with audible amusement. Minseok can hear the normal ambient liquor house conversation resume. A drunkard falling from his stool isn’t an incident worthy of more than a moment’s concern. A more sober man hauling an intoxicated one up and settling him onto a righted seat in a dark corner is unnoteworthy entirely.

By the time Chen has refilled both their cups with baijiu, Minseok has managed to sift through the morass of pain blocking his ability to think, just enough to allow him to stammer out a pair of words.

“You’re afflicted.”

A wry chuckle. “That’s technically true, I suppose.”

The gray hand gestures at Minseok’s drink. “You’re in a lot of pain tonight. Please don’t let your surprise contribute to your suffering.”

Minseok gulps down a pair of swallows, a much more rapid intake than his usual measured sipping.

“Wh… You… How…?” 

His whirling mind refuses to create sentences. He doesn’t understand what’s happening enough to even begin to ask for clarification. He’s not sure he actually wants more information. He’s not sure if the gray hand resting casually on the table between them is even real.

Chen huffs. “You drink. I’ll talk. That is, if you want me to.”

“Yes,” Minseok pants before wrapping his lips once more around the rim of the porcelain cup in lieu of being able to wrap his mind around the conflicting signs before his senses.

Chen has the gray agony. It’s advanced. Minseok can see it. Yet he always seems relaxed. Happy. Minseok can hear it. These things are mutually exclusive. No one knows this better than Minseok.

“I became a greyling a decade ago,” Chen says, tone low but conversational, intimate rather than furtive. “My parents bankrupted themselves trying to treat it. We were rich, and then we weren’t.”

Chen’s voice calcifies. “I was a coward. I couldn’t end my own life, but I couldn’t let my family suffer any more in a futile attempt to save me. So I ran away.”

The hooded figure across from Minseok tucks his gray hand back into his sleeve and leans back in his chair. “I was a prideful little shit. I wouldn’t beg for coins, wouldn’t accept charity to continue the treatments. I just sat by the river and waited to die. But a funny thing happened instead.”

Chen pauses, letting the silence hang. Minseok sets the cup down in front of himself, straining hard to catch every forthcoming word over the cataract of pain in his skull.

“The longer I went without treatment, the more the gray spread. The more my body changed. But… the pain slowly went away.”

“No,” Minseok says, shaking his head. “The gray agony always causes crippling pain. You must have something else. Some other condition.”

“A scientific mind, I see,” Chen chuckles. “My layman’s hypothesis is that it’s the treatment, not the disease, that causes most of the agony.”

“But the pain begins whether treatment is attempted or not,” Minseok protests. 

“True, but it seems that it’s caused by the body’s sudden transformation. Don’t boys who grow suddenly taller feel the ache of it in their bones? This process causes growing pains, too, but just as children mature, so does the disease. It hasn’t progressed any further since the pain stopped.”

“But to just allow one’s body to warp away from nature’s intent? A body cannot function so deformed, even if it’s as painless as you claim,” Minseok scoffs. “No—this cannot be the gray agony we speak of. It is not survivable, especially untreated.” 

“And yet here I am,” Chen chuckles. “And I assure you I am perfectly functional. My reflection shows a different form, but I have made my peace with my appearance. I am still the same man inside. And I am content with my life.” He gestures to the cup. “Take your medicine, then I’ll take you home.”

Minseok shakes his head reflexively, unwilling to allow anyone to know that the increasingly-frequent liquor house visitor is the apothecary’s shameful secret. 

Chen scoffs. “Drink,” he says again. “We’re going for a walk regardless.”

Still trying and failing to sort his thoughts, to identify any other condition among all he’s heard Lu Han talk about that could possibly cause graying of the hands without pain. He’s still wracking his brain through the layer of baijiu-provided goose down as Chen herds him out the rear of the liquor house and into the alley beyond.

They’re entirely alone, shale brick walls of the buildings around them silvered by the ample moonlight. The same moonlight allows Minseok to see Chen’s smiling face clearly when the man pushes back his hood.

_ Handsome _ is Minseok’s first thought. It’s followed almost immediately by  _ no way. _

The moon washes everything into monochrome, so Chen’s skin doesn’t catch any attention for its color. What does catch Minseok’s eyes like an ant in honey are the pair of horny growths curving back from Chen’s forehead.

One of Minseok’s hands flies to his mouth to hold in a shout. And the other reaches for his own forehead, flinches away from the protrusion it finds, then latches on despite the strangeness twisting along his spine.

“No,” Minseok breathes, horrified for Chen, so vivacious and yet so deformed.  _ “No,” _ he gasps again, horrified for himself. 

This stomach-flipping revulsion must be what Lu Han experiences every single morning when his elixir once again fails to render any improvement.

Lu Han.

Hand still over his mouth, Minseok turns and bolts for home.

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He’s shaking so hard when he reaches the door to the shop that his knuckles rap against the wood and Minseok curses himself for his lack of stealth. Lu Han needs his sleep. He does not need to be woken up in the middle of the night by his lover-turned-patient, quivering violently, reeking of the alcohol he’d sloshed over himself in the process of falling off his stool.

Except Lu Han is already up, sobbing against the surface of the apothecary counter, drawers of ingredients pulled open haphazardly all around him.

“Lu Han?” Minseok calls, voice a breathy rattle.

The apothecary’s head shoots up. “Min!”

He’s around the counter in a blink, arms wrapping around Minseok’s body for a split second before Lu Han’s full-body shudder entwines his arms around himself instead.

“Min! I thought you—where were you? You smell like liquor.” 

Minseok winces beneath his hood. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you. I just… went for a drink.”

“Oh, Min. I was so sure you’d gone off to—you promised, Min.”

“I promised,” Minseok agrees, guilt churning itself into the froth of fear and confusion in his gut. “I won’t break that promise. I swear. I just… wanted to forget for a while.”

“Minnie…” Lu Han’s voice lands somewhere between a coo and a sob. “You should have told me. I’ll buy you liquor, or you can drink the medicinal preparations I already have if you’re so desperate in the night. You don’t have to go out. It’s not safe.”

It definitely isn’t safe to go out, but not for the reasons likely flooding Lu Han’s panicky mind.

“I’m sorry,” Minseok says. “I didn’t want to disturb your sleep. Please, go back to bed. I can clean this up.”

“Nonsense,” Lu Han says firmly, entirely back into doctoring mode. “You shouldn’t exert yourself. You need to save your strength. I’ll up the proportion of wu gong powder in the next elixir—if you feel well enough to go wandering around in the middle of the night, it must be having a positive effect.”

“Perhaps,” Minseok agrees, helping to tuck ingredients back into their places regardless of Lu Han’s protests. If he can practically run home from the liquor house, he can handle a little cleaning. As he does, he silently prays for something he hasn’t bothered to ask for in over a year.

_ Please, for Lu Han’s sake—let this next elixir work. _

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It doesn’t. Minseok can barely move with the pain, lying twisted on his pallet, saved from ending himself by his own agony. 

In the morning, it’s all he can do to hide it, to go through his usual self-inspection, to crush Lu Han’s hopes by delivering a negative assessment once again. The following morning, he’s grateful for once that Lu Han can’t look at him, unable to conceal his pain-bared teeth, his furrowed brow. The day after that, he must admit to his former lover that he can’t see well enough through watery eyes to evaluate his condition. The next morning, he can’t even rise from his pallet, dragging himself halfway across the sleeping chamber on his elbows before collapsing into a whimpering heap.

Lu Han makes him snow lotus tea and Minseok doesn’t protest as the analgesic is fed to him spoonful by spoonful until he can crawl back to his pallet. The apothecary brings Minseok a hand mirror, pressing him to at least inspect what symptoms he can, sobbing once at Minseok’s whispered, “No change.” 

The sounds of Lu Han’s slippered feet across the rug as he exits the room seem so final. And for the first time since his lover had brought him to the city he was born in, Minseok spends the day alone.

Heart racing from the snow lotus but exhausted from a restless night, Minseok’s thoughts race in semi-lucid tangles. Is the agony progressing, making his body scream louder as it approaches death? Or is Chen correct and it's the desperate increases in the wu gong powder that are making him wish for death as his beloved attempts to save his life? 

The pain _is_ always the worst a few hours after he takes the day’s elixir.

But medicine sometimes is unpleasant, endurable because it cures. The saying is the worse it tastes, the more effective it must be. So if the elixirs really do cause Minseok pain, surely it’s only because they’re working well to purge the taint from his blood.

Then why isn’t Minseok getting any better? It must be that the disease is advancing, despite the increasingly-potent treatments. If Minseok is still doomed to die, is it cruel to give his lover the false hope of continuing to consume the expensive ingredients? Is it cruel to himself to even try to live?

Distraught and alone, Minseok eventually cries himself to sleep, shut away in the dark.

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	4. Marble

#  Chapter Three: Marble

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That evening, Minseok tries to refuse the elixir.

“You promised, Min,” Lu Han counters. “And I added snow lotus to this one directly. You need to drink it—I can’t stand to see you like this.”

_ I can’t stand to live like this, _ Minseok screams in his mind. But he swallows down the elixir anyway. He  _ had _ promised, and he’s still human enough beneath the suffocating gray to uphold his word. Even if that reluctant promise has, as he’d always feared, become a living hell from which there’s no release but death, the death that each elixir may or may not be staving off for another excruciating length of time.

Surely there can’t be any release from the gray agony but death. Lu Han would know if the disease is survivable without treatment. He would know whether his elixirs contributed to the pain along with delaying the disease. He’s the best apothecary in Beijing. He loves Minseok—or at least he had, once—and he wouldn’t set him up for suffering if there were any other way to keep him alive.

The gray agony always kills. Lu Han has worked a miracle even to keep Minseok by his side for so long. The elixirs may taste hellish, but surely the man who loved him that much wouldn’t give him anything that causes pain except to save his life. A disfigured stranger in the alley behind a liquor house can’t change reality. His testimony and conjecture is not a counter for Lu Han’s knowledge and skill. 

Lu Han is a scholar. A learned man of medicine. The best apothecary in Beijing. The best in all of Zhōngguó. If there were any alternative to suffering or death, he would know.

Lu Han would  _ know. _

The snow lotus keeps Minseok awake as much as the pain had, and when he finally drifts off he’s plunged into vivid dreams.

Dreams of Chen’s laugh, obnoxious but joyful. Dreams of the colorful marketplace in Joseon where Minseok and Lu Han had met. Dreams of his lover, handsome face glossed with sweat as he’d moved urgently with Minseok in the low light of a red-chimneyed lamp. 

Dreams of Chen, handsome face topped by curling horns as he’d smiled tuskily at Minseok in the bright light of a silver-lined moon.

When he wakes, it’s still dark and Minseok can smell himself, perspiration tainted by medicine into something both metallic and herbal. The stench of sickness. Of malaise.

He hauls himself to a sitting position, muscles stiff from being contracted in pain. The agony has receded enough to allow him to move but it’s still flames licking at the edges of his awareness, as if feeling for cracks in the protective snow-lotus bubble, waiting for the chance to roar into any gap.

Minseok slowly pushes himself to his knees, then his feet, cursing under his breath when he stumbles, knees thumping against rug-covered wood. He looks toward Lu Han’s pallet, afraid he’d woken the hardworking apothecary. But the pallet is empty, bedding still neat, not as if Lu Han’s merely up for a cup of water or to relieve himself.

The feeling rushing over Minseok at the unused bed is all at once hotter than his sharpest pain and colder than the frozen depths of his despair. It’s followed by a thick blanket of shame, because hadn’t he abandoned his own pallet so many times for the comfort of alcohol? And, more recently, for the fluttering thrill of a little conversation?

How can he condemn the man he loves for being unable to sleep beneath the weight of his burden? For prowling the night in search of solace? Except Minseok’s burden is his pain, his disease, his disfigurement, his uselessness.

Lu Han’s burden is  _ Minseok. _

_ This is your fault, _ a little voice says.  _ You’ve driven him from his own bedroom. _

The stench of his skin is louder, though, so Minseok goes to the washroom without another glance at his rumpled blankets or Lu Han’s undisturbed bedding.

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The water in the washbasin is cold as usual, and as usual Minseok welcomes it. He scrubs himself down with a rough cloth and harsh soap, hating every too-prominent joint and protruding edge of bone. Hating the cornified growths on his forehead. Hating the horns they’ll evidently become.

_ Monster. Invalid. Burden. _

How much money is Lu Han spending on the exotic ingredients keeping him alive? Had he looked a little thinner lately? His empty pallet says he’s not sleeping enough. Is his stomach sometimes empty, too?

Has Minseok been frittering coins away on alcohol that could have fed the man making himself ill as he strives to cure his former lover?

_ Monster. Selfish. Burden. _

Skin raw from scrubbing, Minseok covers his nauseating form with a robe. Not a soft, silken one that Lu Han had given his beloved. Not the enveloping black one that has concealed him so many times as he’d drunk away his pain. Just a simple, roughspun hooded tunic, sleeves long, cut for a bigger man, a nobler one, worn as the apothecary had labored beneath the sun or moon, harvesting fresh ingredients from their secret places in mountains or valleys, forests or fields.

_ Monster. Undeserving. Burden. _

Concealed beneath the clothing still vaguely scented of the man he doesn’t deserve to love, Minseok creeps from the living quarters and through the apothecary’s workroom, full of alembics and distillers, crucibles and bundles of ingredients, animal and vegetable, hanging to dry in neat rows tacked to the beams of the low ceiling.

Lu Han is there, sprawled over the worktable beside a candle-warmed flask, scale and weights scattered nearby, a sachet of some probably-priceless ingredient still clutched in unconscious fingers. His chest rises and falls, the deep sleep of the exhausted, overcome in the middle of his neverending efforts to restore Minseok to his former self.

He looks so young and thin and fragile, burning away his own life force to breathe some into the man he loved enough to promise the impossible. Only a truly deplorable wretch would ever think this selfless man capable of causing anyone unnecessary pain.

_ Monster. Ungrateful. Burden. _

Unable to bear the sight of his own sins, Minseok blows out the candle beneath the flask, then skulks down through the shuttered shop and out into the night.

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He doesn’t really intend to go to the liquor house. He’s not in an unbearable amount of pain—not physically, at least. His tears tonight are of anguish rather than agony and he’s determined not to waste another coin on his own selfish indulgence. But his feet really only know this one path and in the absence of conscious direction, the liquor house is where they take him.

“Min!”

Startled out of the whirlpool sucking him down into the depths of his mind, Minseok looks up at the sound of his name.

“It  _ is _ you!” Chen, hood once again hiding what sent Minseok fleeing to the safety of home, is at their usual table, waving an overlong sleeve at him so enthusiastically his stool is threatening to tip from beneath him.

Propelled more by the questioning stares of many strangers than by this one stranger’s joy in his arrival, Minseok shuffles over to take the stool opposite the literally-bouncing man.

“Min, it’s so good to see you, it’s been long enough that I thought you might have—well. It’s just  _ really _ good to see you.” Chen’s voice carries affection and relief and he reaches across the table as if to take Minseok’s hand before the too-long sleeve settles against the polished rosewood instead. “Are you all right? Is it because of me?”

Minseok nods, then shakes his head, overwhelmed by the questions and by Chen’s too-earnest welcome. Chen doesn’t even know him, doesn’t know more than a single syllable of his name, that he’s afflicted with the gray agony, that he prefers harder liquor, that his vowels reveal him as Joseon-born, that his philosophy tends toward the zen view of things. He doesn’t know that Minseok was once a promising young scholar, that his favorite color is the blue of the sky he no longer sees in daylight, that his favorite season used to be spring, enraptured by the world’s rebirth, but that now it only makes him sad for what will never again be his. 

Now Minseok is a man of winter, gray and cold and bitter, his existence bleak and isolated and lifeless.

But Chen, whose own agony seems to be anything but, is happy to see him even if he’s never properly  _ seen _ him, thrilled to have the company of a stranger who’s only chatty when plied with enough alcohol and never reveals anything about himself if he can help it. Chen, who has never asked Minseok for anything besides his name.

Why does this stranger’s welcome squeeze Minseok’s heart more than the sight of his erstwhile lover collapsed with exhaustion mid-formulation of yet another elixir with which to save his life?

Minseok can’t begin to fathom.

“I missed you,” Chen says.

Minseok can’t begin to respond.

When Chen calls to the liquor master for another cup, Minseok doesn’t object. When Chen pours the tea-colored huangjiu into the porcelain and slides it below Minseok’s drooping hood, he doesn’t hesitate to knock it back. And when Chen reaches out, slipping his ash gray fingers from his own sleeve into Minseok’s to touch his hand, skin to skin, warmth to chill, Minseok doesn’t pull away.

In fact, he turns his wrist, enabling their hands to fit together more tightly, fingers interlocked like the marble blocks of a moon bridge, connecting opposite riverbanks with the beauty, elegance, and grace that Minseok was once adored for.

“I missed you, too,” Minseok finds himself saying, realizing the words are true only as they leave his mouth. 

Chen squeezes his hand and the simple action is enough to send a rush of pleasure from arm to spine, from spine to core. It kindles into something Minseok hasn’t felt in years. The heat of this stranger’s hand, the grip of bare fingers against Minseok’s own make him feel  _ wanted, _ a carnal illusion that spits in the face of reality. 

Who could want Minseok more than the man slaving to save his life?

_ Monster. Disloyal. Deviant.  _

Minseok uses their clasped hands to pull the other man across the table, ducking his face beneath Chen’s hood, pressing his teeth-distorted lips against whatever surface they happen to encounter. Chen turns his face to catch Minseok’s mouth with his own, fingertip-sized tusks at the corners of his lower jaw dragging dully over Minseok’s skin before their lips fit together comfortably. It’s awkward at first to manage his own too-large teeth and just as he gets the hang of it Chen pulls away.

“Not here,” he breathes, dropping coins on the table and once again ushering Minseok out the back and into the alley.

Once concealed by the shadows of the surrounding buildings, Chen again lowers his hood, heated eyes observing Minseok beneath curled horns and above those gently-protruding tusks. There’s less of a moon tonight but that doesn’t make the man’s face any less impactful.

Impatient with the extra fabric, Minseok tosses back his own hood and fumbles his hands from his overlong sleeves to cup that face and kiss Chen again. 

Humming approval against Minseok’s mouth, Chen wraps his arms around Minseok to pull him close. There are layers of fabric between their bodies but it still feels like they glow wherever they touch, every shift in contact sparking anew like the snap of air on a dry winter’s day.

Chen’s hands are caressing Minseok’s back, his spine, knobs and all, his face, thumbs moving in tandem to sweep tears from below Minseok’s squeezed-shut eyes.

“I’ve wanted to touch you for so long,” Chen sighs, moving his mouth to Minseok’s neck. Every motion of his lower jaw presses the dull tusks against heated skin. It’s not unpleasant, and it’s not long before Minseok’s lonely mind begins to wonder where else the gentle drag of dull tusks would feel good.

“Chen,” Minseok gasps, tightening his arms around what turns out to be a surprisingly-narrow waist beneath the enveloping robes. “Zhongda—Jongdae.”

At the sound of his name pronounced in the Joseon manner Chen groans deep in his throat, sucking harder at Minseok’s skin.

“Jongdae,” Minseok says again, pulling their hips together. The friction this provides to his touch-starved groin is addicting and Minseok ruts against the man in his arms, drawing more moans and reciprocal hip thrusts from Chen— _ Jongdae. _

“Min,” Jongdae sighs, returning his attentions to Minseok’s mouth. “You’re perfect.  _ Min.” _

He rolls his hips repeatedly as Minseok crushes their loins together, and it’s enough to set Minseok’s core tingling, stronger and tighter until all of a sudden he’s convulsing with a cry that Jongdae catches with smiling lips.

“Min,” he says, cradling him close. “Oh, Min, you’re so precious. Come away with me. Let me cherish you.”

“I can’t,” Minseok chokes out, conscience returning in the wake of his slaked lust.

“You can,” Jongdae counters.

The handsome face in front of Minseok dissolves into the moonlight, blurred by tears.

“I belong to another.” His voice is a little shaky but he manages to make the syllables clear.

Jongdae releases Minseok to slump against the wall of the liquor house.

“The apothecary?”

Startled, Minseok curls in on himself, nauseated with shame. This sin dwarfs all his others, that he’d not only betray Lu Han but expose him as someone who kept the intimate company of men, even if they hadn’t shared so much as an embrace in over two years.

He tries to shake his head but Jongdae scoffs.

“I followed you after you ran from me. I was worried you’d get lost or have a mishap—you hold your liquor well at the table, but that’s not the same as being able to run through the dark.”

Minseok shrinks further against the wall. He shakes his head again.

“Do you only live with him for treatment, then? Have you a lover waiting for you somewhere else? in Joseon? Some woman?”

Flinching away from Jongdae’s harshening tone, Minseok fights down his panic. Too many questions are being flung at him, too-intimate questions that Jongdae has never before asked, so even if his voice were steady, Minseok would shy away from them like a new-trained carthorse before a barking dog.

When Minseok’s silence is broken only by a smothered sob, Jongdae huffs.

“I suppose I should be flattered,” he says bitterly. “I was afraid my face had scared you off. That I’d shocked you too badly. That you wouldn’t come back, that you’d seek your own end so as not to choose between the pain of the treatment or the horror of… looking like me.”

To this Minseok can shake his head, vigorously and immediately.

“I  _ was  _ shocked,” he forces out. “But I’d have come back. I really did miss you. And I can’t sleep at all anymore without something to dull the agony, anyway.”

“You’re in that much pain?” 

Minseok nods. “So much I can’t bear to move at all. That’s why I haven’t been by.”

“But you’re here now.”

“My last treatment contained snow lotus.”

Jongdae lifts his head to eye Minseok incredulously.

“You say this as if it’s a new addition.”

Minseok nods. “The first.”

“That is cruelty,” Jongdae almost snarls, tusks adding to the force of his words. “To poison you with so-called remedies and not even dull the pain they cause.”

Minseok shakes his head. “It was my choice—my refusal. I didn’t wish to contaminate my body with anything that might interfere with the cure.”

“Yet you drink.”

“I am weak.” Minseok looks meaningfully down at the stain on the front of his robes.

“You are  _ not _ weak,” Jongdae growls. “You are simply stupid. The treatments only delay the inevitable, and the inevitable isn’t death. It is still life, merely transformed. If you cannot embrace the life you’ve been given, at least dull the pain of clinging to the life you’ve lost.”

_ The life you’ve lost. _ The words echo in Minseok’s skull, a ringing mockery to all his suffering.  _ The love you just threw away. _

The leather soles of his shoes fall like hammers in the darkness as Minseok once again flees Jongdae’s presence.

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	5. Limestone

#  Chapter Four: Limestone

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Minseok doesn’t visit the liquor house for weeks. The snow lotus dulls the worst of the pain for a while but it makes his heart race and steals away his sleep, leaving him irritable and surly, fidgeting in his nest during the day and shifting restlessly on his pallet at night. Eventually Minseok refuses the painkiller entirely, but that results in a night spent chewing through his pillow in an effort not to shriek in agony along with what feels like every joint in his body. Lu Han cries as he cleans up the goose down escaped from the pillow, feathers and fabric streaked with blood from where Minseok’s too-large teeth abraded his lip as he gnawed away his screams.

“My poor Min,” Lu Han mourns, tears running from huge eyes to drip off his pointed chin. “I can’t let you hurt yourself like this. If you won’t take the snow lotus, I’ll add the tears of the poppy. It’ll steal the pain and help you sleep, and I will make sure the dosage won’t interfere with the treatments.”

Minseok can’t find any objections. The pain screaming throughout his body is way too loud to be ignored in favor of birdsong, ignored in favor of finding a cure.

The pain is so loud Minseok’s hopes don’t even extend to a cure. He doesn’t deserve a cure, doesn’t deserve to resume his life at Lu Han’s side after he turned his back on his lover’s undying loyalty. He’d betrayed Lu Han, betrayed himself with Jongdae and while he deserves this pain and more, he is, as he’d confessed to the man he’d stolen pleasure with, weak. 

Weak enough to finally, truly  _ want _ to die. For his sins, perhaps, but mostly for the entire absence of all sensation, pleasure or pain. All he wants is peace, stillness, numbness.

The poppy tears provide and Minseok weeps in relief. He sleeps like the dead man the mere whispers of pain no longer tempt him to become. Oh, he still sees his own doom approaching like a smear of smoke on the horizon. But the poppy tears steal all his objections to anything, and Minseok is all too glad of it. Otherwise the weight of his betrayal would be crushing him. Beneath the poppy’s haze it’s merely a faded stain on his already-dingy soul. No reason to confess, no reason to inflict yet another burden on the hardworking apothecary.

Or so it would be, if the poppy tears didn’t give him vivid, lucid dreams. Dreams of arms wrapped around him like Minseok was the only thing preventing drowning. Lips that recurved like a Manchu bow around surprisingly-sensual tusks. Deep, guttural groans that made his belly tighten. The deliberate, rhythmic friction that had sent him flying like a festival firecracker. 

But the poppy also grants him distance, as if these memories are someone else’s. Someone who’d lived a long time ago, someone whose few moments of pleasure from a stranger could not erase years of devotion from the man he loves. The man that loves him, even though he’s weak and diseased and tainted, body and soul.

With the addition of the poppy tears to the daily elixir, Minseok can resume his normal routine of wrapping his repulsiveness in swathes of silk, dozing in the corner of Lu Han’s workroom, listening to his beloved talk to himself and sing idly as he works. Lu Han spends many hours poring over scrolls and tomes, looking for ingredients that will still be effective despite the soporific pain-dulling tears of the poppy. Whenever Minseok starts growing restless in his corner, discomfort increasing despite the strength of the elixirs, Lu Han increases the poppy tears to compensate. 

Minseok’s days are now a soft blur of naps interrupted by meals. At the end of each evening, he shifts from his nest in the corner of the workroom to his pallet in the corner of the bedroom, offering a drowsy response to Lu Han’s murmur of “Goodnight, Min. I love you.” 

And every morning, he scrubs himself into reluctant wakefulness with cold water and harsh soap, forcing his brain to function enough to properly evaluate the effects of Lu Han’s efforts. Then he returns to his nest in the workroom to sleep away most of the day. 

This routine persists, Minseok pliant and cooperative as he waits for his death, Lu Han steady and determined as he fights for his Minnie’s life. Until one morning, eyes with sclerae more lemon than amber blink back at him from the polished metal of the mirror.

“It’s working,” Minseok breathes. “Lu Han, my eyes!”

“Are you sure?”

Minseok nods, remembers Lu Han isn’t looking at him, and says, “Yes. They’re definitely less yellow.”

“But the growths on your forehead? Your teeth?” Lu Han presses.

“They seem unchanged,” Minseok admits, elation shriveling away.

“Hmm. Further testing is required. Perhaps a longer duration of treatment is necessary before the harsher symptoms begin to resolve. But this is promising!”

A tendril of happiness slithers back up to wrap tentatively around Minseok’s heart.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Promising indeed.”

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It takes another week for the first knobby growth to come away from Minseok’s forehead, knocked askew in his sleep. He tugs it the rest of the way off, uncaring about the bloody wound left behind. Lu Han makes him a healing poultice to apply, and does so again three days later when Minseok is able to peel the second growth away. It’s a little odd, after so many years, to feel the silk of his hood directly against his forehead instead of being held just away by the pair of protuberances.

He doesn’t notice any changes in his bones or teeth for another five days when he can confidently say his teeth feel smaller in his mouth and the spurs on his vertebrae are less pronounced. And by the end of that week, the grayish cast of his skin has faded enough that he merely looks tanned instead of ashen.

In his enthusiasm, Lu Han manages to both look Minseok in the face to verify the improvement with only a tiny shudder and embrace him in celebration for the space of an entire heartbeat.

“I told you I’d fix it!” the apothecary crows. “It will be costly to continue the treatments lifelong, but the expense will be more than offset when I announce that gray agony is finally curable. I’ll have lines of eager clients out the door and down the street.”

Minseok smiles, too, remembering to keep his limestone lips closed over his still-overlarge teeth. The dose of poppy tears in his elixirs these days is quite large, so it takes a moment for the nuance of Lu Han’s statement to fully resonate.

“Wait—lifelong?”

“Well, of course, my love. We can’t risk the symptoms recurring, can we? It may take decades for the contamination to be fully cleansed from your blood, if ever.”

Lu Han is humming happily as he tugs Minseok’s hood back up and escorts him to his silken nest, cooing at him a little as he smothers a yawn into a squeak before curling up.

“You’re just like a cat, aren’t you, Minnie?” Lu Han laughs. “My sweet, precious kitten.”

Minseok would protest except he can’t seem to keep his eyes open long enough to do so.

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It isn’t for another week that Minseok remembers Jongdae. 

The memory is born out of a dream, lips curling back to smile around tusklike teeth and Minseok is sitting up on his pallet, propelled from his sleep by guilt.

There’s a cure for gray agony. There’s a cure, and Jongdae doesn’t know about it. He could go back to his family. He could resume his life. Minseok owes him this knowledge, owes him this chance even if delivering the news will be incredibly awkward. Minseok deserves awkward, especially if he’ll also be saying goodbye.

He doesn’t need the alcohol anymore. He doesn’t need the stolen comfort of Jongdae’s touch. Soon he’ll be well enough to warrant Lu Han’s. It’s only a matter of time before Minseok is able to pleasure the man who saved his life.

Buoyed by thoughts of repaying his lover for all his hard work, Minseok feels strong enough to face the man he’d so selfishly used. For the first time in two months, Minseok slinks from his bed, drapes the black robe over his steadily-improving body, and heads to the liquor house beneath a sooty sky.

“Chen hasn’t been here in a few weeks,” the liquor master says when Minseok asks him for information rather than alcohol. “I think he figured you’d not return. But I still have your baijiu, if you want it.”

Nausea fights with stupor as Minseok blinks at the liquor master from beneath his hood. “No, thank you,” he squeezes out. “If you see him, can you give him a message?”

“I will do my best.”

“Please tell him Min has something important to tell him. He knows where I live.” He sets a stack of coins on the table for the man’s trouble. 

The liquor master nods. “That’s easy enough to remember.”

Bidding the man his thanks, Minseok returns home, choked by the guilt of ignoring someone who’d been kind to him. Of using Jongdae for companionship, for comfort, for carnal acts, and then avoiding him as if that could erase his shame. For forgetting about him for so long after being given back his life.

Of course Jongdae wasn’t waiting for him at their usual table. What if he never returned to that liquor house? What if he got the message but was too mad at Minseok to bother finding out what information the cowardly man found important? What if Lu Han wanted to move to a better part of town once the gray agony cure made him wealthy enough to afford to do so?

What if he never saw Jongdae again?

The very thought takes hold of Minseok like a serpent, constantly coiled around his chest and squeezing tighter whenever Minseok remembers how happy Jongdae had looked in the fleeting moment between Minseok throwing back his hood and bringing their lips together.

How he’d frowned when Minseok refused to go away with him, eyebrows curving up like eaves to support the roof of his furrowed brow.

How his face had fallen when Minseok had given his reason. How he had dropped his dark eyes to his feet. How he’d nonetheless been angry at the thought of Minseok in pain.

How he’d moaned in Minseok’s arms.

How earnest he’d looked in the moment before Minseok had turned and fled.

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Every day, Minseok looks more and more human. And every day, Minseok feels more and more guilty about drowsing in his nest of silks, Lu Han bringing him dried persimmons or a pork-filled steamed bun to snack on, patting his ever-paler hands, smiling at the still-shyly-hidden face beneath the silken hood.

Guilt for betraying this devoted man. Guilt for enjoying that devotion even as Jongdae skulks around in his hood, unaware he has any other option besides acceptance or death.

Where is Jongdae staying, if not with his family? How does he live? He must have some source of income if he can afford to visit the liquor house. He must have somewhere to shelter if he’d asked Minseok to join him there. 

But his concern and curiosity are quickly muffled by the poppy tears sedation, like almost every other thought Minseok has these days. The only things he can dwell on for any length of time anymore are guilt and giddiness, and the giddiness is finally starting to overwhelm the guilt.

_ I’m free! I’m healing! I’m alive! _

Others are being set free as well, incidental beneficiaries of Lu Han’s perseverance. It fills him with an incredible glow to listen from the workroom, sitting at the top of the stairs as hope is restored to family after family, lover after lover. Minseok had kept his promise, enabling Lu Han to keep his. All his suffering had been worth it, for himself and for so many others.

And then his guilt sinks teeth into him again, because Jongdae’s still out there. Still afflicted. Still burdened with curving horns that reflect the moonlight and dull tusks that fail to obscure the curve of his smile.

He’d been so kind to Minseok. Had treated him like a friend instead of a freak. If anyone deserves to be cured, it’s the man that had kept Minseok company while he waited for his salvation.

That still-handsome face deserves to be undisturbed by abnormal growths. That bubbly personality deserves to be unleashed once again in public under the light of day.

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Yet it’s under dark of night that Minseok finally sees Jongdae again. Minseok, loving that he’s well enough to once again be helpful during his sporadic periods of wakefulness, is on the way home from delivering a course of treatment to the daughter of a wealthy merchant who doesn’t want anyone to know someone in his household needs the apothecary. He’s humming to himself, hood back, face tilted up to the stars, only to startle violently when a familiar voice comes out of the darkness.

“Min?”

Fist pressed over his racing heart, Minseok turns to see a hooded figure in an alleyway.

“Chen?”

The figure scoffs. “Back to pseudonyms after you came apart in my arms? I suppose that’s only fair, seeing as I still don’t know your full name.”

Minseok winces. “Jongdae, I—I’m sorry. It was habit—I didn’t mean to seem distancing. My name is Kim Minseok, and I’m glad to see you. I have good news—”

“I’ve heard it,” Jongdae dismisses. “And I’m not interested.”

“If you can’t afford it, I’m sure Lu Han will let you work at the apothecary to earn it. He’s so busy now, and it would be useful to have someone able to explain the treatment from a position of first-hand experience—”

“Why don’t  _ you _ explain it?” Jongdae snaps. “It seems to have worked  _ miracles _ for you.”

“I’ve tried,” Minseok admits. “I get too drowsy. I talk in circles, forget what I’ve already said.”

“Drowsy? What happened to being unable to sleep well?” 

“The tears of the poppy keep me very well rested.”

“Too well rested to care if someone was worried about you? Someone who didn’t know if you were still alive after you again fled from a future you couldn’t face?”

The simple sentence has more bite than Minseok would have guessed it could hold. “I’m sorry for running away from you—twice. My shame over taking advantage of you shouldn’t condemn you to affliction—” 

“I’m not  _ afflicted, _ ” Jongdae spits. “I’m just  _ changed. _ And only on the surface—I’m still myself underneath. I’m not in pain, nor am I so lulled by the tears of the poppy as to be sluggish and disoriented.”

“it’s not that bad,” Minseok dismisses. Sure, he sleeps a lot but Lu Han is so happy when he’s awake. He strokes his hooded head, coos over him, repeatedly professes his love. Minseok is sure the only thing preventing them from re-consummating their relationship are the lingering knobs along Minseok’s spine, preventing him from lying comfortably on his back and unarousing to eyes and fingers in any other relational position.

Jongdae steps out of the shadows, face unhidden. “Neither is this,” he says. “Why do you fight so hard to avoid it? Surely you aren’t so vain as to sacrifice your waking life for some narrow standard of beauty.”

“I’m not vain,” Minseok protests. “I merely want to be healthy again.”

“Do we call the drunkard that can’t rouse himself for work  _ healthy? _ Or those that smoke themselves into stupors on the very substance with which you dull your pain?”

“Lu Han does not dose me overmuch,” Minseok defends. “I am here, running an errand—providing relief to another.”

_ “Poisoning _ another, you mean. Surely you’ve heard the Emperor’s edict against casual consumption of poppy tears. It dulls the pain less and less as your system becomes accustomed, requiring ever higher doses that further suppress your energy. Soon you’ll be unable to live without it. Yet you are still in pain—I can see it in the way you stand.” 

Jongdae’s face softens and he steps closer, looking for a moment like he would reach for Minseok’s hand. “It’s entirely unnecessary, this elaborate avoidance of superficial changes. Especially when you still suffer despite your lack of symptoms. Do you still believe it’s the disease that pains you rather than this ‘cure?’ Do you even remember what it’s like to feel no pain at all?”

_ Yes, _ Minseok doesn’t say.  _ When I found ecstasy in your arms. _

“I am comfortable enough,” Minseok says instead. “And it’s worth a bit of pain to be my former self again. To be able to resume my life.” He starts walking again, concerned that Lu Han will worry if he lingers overlong. It was difficult to convince the apothecary he was well enough for the journey and he doesn’t want to seem as if his fatigue delayed him.

“Why must you resume that life?” Jongdae asks, falling into step beside him. “What can you do when dosed, drowsy and in discomfort that you cannot do if you discontinued treatment entirely?”

Minseok is glad the night hides his blush. “My relationship of course suffered when I was most afflicted,” he admits, disclosing the personal information almost as an explanation for his moment of weakness in the shadow of the liquor house. “I wish to rebuild it. Lu Han worked so hard to restore me. I owe him—”

_ “You owe him?” _ Jongdae repeats. “You owe him for feeding you agony because he couldn’t love you unless he cured you? That’s what you mean when you say your relationship suffered, isn’t it? How long had it been since he touched you, that you’d melt so easily in my arms?”

“It isn’t like that,” Minseok objects, face burning up to his ears with anger on top of embarrassment. “Lu Han loves me. It was hard for him to see me suffer, I couldn’t expect him to—”

“Min? Who are you talking to?” Lu Han is standing in the doorway of the shop, dressed as if he were about to go on a stroll. His gaze darts from Minseok to Jongdae before he drops it to Jongdae’s feet. “Are you here for treatment, Sir?”

Jongdae curls a lip. “I do not want your poison, but I can see why Min willingly drinks it if this is the standard to which he’s compared.”

Lu Han straightens up, puffing with affront. “I do not dispense  _ poison, _ I carefully formulate remedies. As advanced as your case is, you must be in constant pain—I can understand your temper. But with treatment—”

“With treatment I can choose to be in agony or be addle-minded,” Jongdae spits. “Without it, I am perfectly well and entirely pain-free. I will not suffer for beauty.”

He turns to Minseok, face twisted into a sneer. “Enjoy your life as a coddled, sedate prisoner,” Jongdae says, voice dipped in bitterness. “I hope your warden is at least generous between the sheets.”

He flips his hood up so vigorously that the fabric snaps audibly into place, then stomps off into the darkness.

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	6. Granite

#  Chapter Five: Granite

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“I was just about to come after you,” Lu Han says. “I wouldn’t have let you go out if I knew it would be so dangerous.”

_ I missed you, _ whispers a voice in the shadows of Minseok’s memory.

“Jongdae isn’t dangerous,” Minseok dismisses, dropping onto the entryway bench with a huff to remove his shoes. 

“He was yelling at you,” Lu Han protests. “And who knows what an untreated gray agony victim may be driven by pain to do.”

“He’s not in pain,” Minseok huffs, shoving his shoes into the rack.

“He must be,” Lu Han insists.

“He’s not,” Minseok states. “He’s allowed the disease to run its course. He’s disfigured but not in pain.”

Lu Han blinks. “That’s  _ horrible.” _ He shudders, then rests a hand briefly on Minseok’s shoulder before tugging his hood back over his head. “I’m so glad we didn’t give up. You deserve to be everything you were before, my long-suffering love.”

_ You’re perfect, _ an echo murmurs.

Minseok knocks the hood back away from his face. “Why is it horrible? Jongdae’s not deformed nearly as badly as I’d always feared my fate to be.”

“Not yet,” Lu Han says, tugging Minseok’s hood up again. “But those teeth—soon he’ll be unable to eat. And the weight of such large forehead growths must surely strain his neck. It will only get worse—his arms won’t be able to stretch or bend, his spine—”

“His condition has been stable for a decade,” Minseok interjects, flicking his hood back down. “And the forehead growths are hollow—I learned that when I shed mine. I am beyond grateful for your dedication in finding me a cure, but I think if I’d have known at the beginning that the symptoms would only ever get that bad and that the treatment process would be so painful, I think I could have come to terms with living as Jongdae does.”

“Nonsense,” Lu Han dismisses. “Some of the elixir ingredients are harsh, true, but the disease is not called the gray agony because it’s painless. And If this afflicted one has indeed survived without treatment, why has he not made himself known to the medical world for study and verification? How can I risk my beloved’s very life on the sayso of a single uneducated stranger?”

He looks at Minseok with those huge, earnest eyes. “Besides, you’re my precious jade—I could never let you languish as a granite goblin.” 

“He’s not a goblin! He’s—”

“Oh, Min, you’re such a soft heart. My tender little kitten. Put that wretch from your thoughts and come drink your elixir—we’ve delayed it long enough.” He lifts Minseok’s hood back into place, then tugs at his sleeve to lead him toward the staircase.

_ Come away with me, _ urges the ghost of a handsome stranger.

Minseok stands firm, irked beyond reason at the silk shadowing his face. “What if I don’t want to drink it?” he asks. 

“I’ll add more sugar if that will make it more palatable.”

“I don’t care if it’s palatable. I care if you can stand to let me leave the hood off in the sanctuary of my own home. I care if you were lying when you said I’d always be beautiful to you. I care if you actually love me, enough to let me choose which way to live my life.”

Lu Han looks as if he’d been slapped. “Min,” he says, voice weak and eyes watery. “Of course I love you. And you’re more beautiful to me every day.” He puts gentle hands on Minseok’s upper arms. “Are you feeling unattractive? Let me reassure you.” 

He leans in to press a kiss on Minseok’s shadowed cheek. Minseok turns so their lips connect instead, causing Lu Han to recoil with a smothered yelp.

“Sorry, love,” the apothecary says sheepishly. “I wasn’t expecting your, um. Your teeth.”

“They’re practically normal.”

“Yes, and aren’t you pleased? The symptoms will continue to resolve if you come take your medicine.”

Minseok doesn’t move.

“Min, you promised,” Lu Han wheedles. “You don’t want to give up on yourself now after I’ve worked so hard to find you this cure. I didn’t break my promise. I know you’re not going to break yours.”

Lu Han’s talented, life-saving fingers are still wrapped around Minseok’s upper arms. They feel more restraining than reassuring. But Lu Han’s face is sincere and sorrowful, doe eyes big and glistening with unshed tears.

Minseok goes upstairs and drinks his elixir.

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On a sunny morning two weeks later, Minseok stares at himself in the mirror as usual. He’s only a shade duskier than he was before, and he’d been on the pale side to start with—many perfectly healthy people are naturally darker than he currently is. His upper eyeteeth are only slightly enlarged and his lower ones only a touch thickened, still blunter than usual but entirely unnoticeable behind closed lips. The whites of his eyes are indeed white again, his forehead only bears a pair of flat, fading scars where the hollow growths once protruded, and his elbows only have a slightly-exaggerated point. He can’t even see the residual knobs along his spine although his questing fingers can still feel them beneath the skin. 

Yet last night, he’d attempted to initiate a little affection with his supposed lover. He hadn’t even wanted much, just a little body contact as Lu Han had made meticulous lists of ingredients and sources in preparation to begin producing the ‘miracle elixir’ in larger quantities to meet increasing demand. Minseok had merely slid a low stool up to Lu Han’s left side, leaving his right hand free to move the bamboo pen over the page. He hadn’t even really leaned against him, just rested his shoulder against Lu Han’s, only to be chided for disturbing his work.

“This is important, Minnie,” Lu Han had said. “If you’re sleepy, go ahead to bed.”

Minseok had obeyed, curling up on the pallet they used to share, inhaling the scent of the oils Lu Han uses in his hair. Lu Han had woken him up with a gentle admonishment to go to his own pallet, saying he needed to get his sleep to be ready for his long line of gray agony patients in the morning.

And it isn’t as though Minseok doesn’t recognize the importance of providing the cure to those that need it as quickly as possible. But here he is, staring at himself, completely unbothered by his appearance at all, and still, Lu Han hadn’t even glanced at him as he’d undressed for the daily ritual of evaluation.

“Still improving, right? Good. I left some fruit and rice for you by your spot in the workroom—if I’m not able to bring you lunch, there’s still some porridge over the cookfire.”

And then he’d left Minseok standing there, nude and stony-faced with surprise.

He knows it’s selfish to want a little attention from the man he’d promised to live for. But he still sulks like a child sent to sit in the corner, chewing rice and fruit over-vigorously with almost-normal teeth, falling asleep with a pout on his face.

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The next day Minseok drinks as much green tea with breakfast as he can hold, choosing to repeatedly relieve his bladder in exchange for a burst of energy. He dresses himself in what had been his favorite silk robe in Joseon, no hood to be seen, merely the matching silk cap that covers only the top of his head. 

It doesn’t fully cover the scars on his forehead but he forces himself not to care. Many people have scars. They’re still allowed to be out in public without being forced to hide their faces. Some choose to, of course. But Minseok chooses to bare his face without shame.

He gathers his purse—their cashflow has already dramatically improved, more than enough for a little almost-normal celebratory self-indulgence—and heads downstairs, sitting on the bench in the entryway to put on his shoes.

The low murmur of conversation in the apothecary shop stops abruptly.

“Min?” Lu Han asks, almost as if he questions the reality of what he’s seeing. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going out,” Minseok says cheerfully. “Do you want anything from the market?”

“I—what? No, you can’t—”

“I absolutely can. I’m well again and I’m tired of sitting around sleeping all the time.”

“But you need to rest—”

“I’ve rested enough. Do you want some of those plums you like? I think they’re in season.”

“Oh, they are, dear!” the older woman in front of the apothecary counter says. “I just bought some from Zhang’s orchard—they have a stall at the market, and their plums are the absolute sweetest!”

Minseok bows. “Thank you, Auntie!” he chirps, and then he fairly skips out the door.

He ignores how hot with smothered hurt Lu Han’s eyes are as he leaves. 

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The market is always bustling but it seems brighter and more vibrant today than Minseok’s ever seen it. This may well be because he hasn’t seen it in years, of course, but that doesn’t stop him from enjoying it. There’s sunlight on his face! There’s wind toying with the ends of his hair. It’s quite long—perhaps he’ll have it cut while he’s out. 

Minseok can’t keep the grin off his face as he strolls down the street in broad daylight like a normal person. And, in what seems like a miracle worth suffering for all over again, people look him in the face and smile back.

_ Jongdae smiled at you before, _ a voice whispers, but Minseok ignores it. Jongdae is a single person. That can’t compare to the smiles of the whole world. Of children! He reaches out to pat a smiling little girl but hesitates as a sudden chill seems to suck all the sunlight out of the day. 

Minseok only  _ looks _ healthy. Lu Han implied that his blood is still tainted, may be forever, and that means he could potentially contaminate someone else. It’s not known to be contagious via an innocent touch. But he hadn’t known about the tiny scrape on his ankle that had doomed him. How can he be sure a touch is truly safe?

Suddenly Lu Han’s aversion to affection feels rational rather than unreasonable. If the taint is in Minseok’s blood, what else is it in? His saliva? His spend? How can he ask Lu Han to take that risk? Lu Han, who wouldn’t be able to offer the miraculous cure to anyone if he were in agony himself?

_ Monster. Selfish. Dangerous. _

Minseok’s looks may be returning, but his health has never felt so far away.

Burning with shame, Minseok regrets everything about this outing but especially the choice to leave his hood at home. He wants nothing more than to hide away beneath the anonymity of enveloping fabric, but the best he can do is keep his head down as he hastens through the crowd,

“Hey, it’s you!”

The voice is so bright and happy that Minseok can’t help but look up, expecting to see some tender reunion, someone ending up in someone’s arms. Instead, he looks at the tall, handsome youth smiling directly at him, then looks over his shoulder to ensure the boy wasn’t actually addressing someone else.

“Me?” Minseok asks, voice a little squeaky.

“Yeah, I mean, it must be. You look just like Uncle’s latest bust. Or rather, it looks just like  _ you.” _

Minseok opens his mouth but pauses as too many thoughts tangle in their simultaneous attempt to be expressed. The young man just laughs, beckoning Minseok over to his shop, one evidently in the pottery business based on the goods displayed neatly on sturdy tables.  _ Trollshead Stoneware _ is painted in sharp strokes on the placard Minseok passes beneath to enter the shop.

“My uncle makes the best pottery, but he also likes to sculpt,” the boy explains as he leads Minseok through shelves lined with lumps wrapped in damp cloth. “He made this a few months ago and it’s one of his best works.”

The young man stops in front of a shelf holding unobscured art, a sculpture of a fox, one of a dragon, and one, very obviously, of Minseok. Well, Minseok with horns and tusks just like— 

“Jongdae,” Minseok breathes. “Your uncle. Zhongda—Chen.”

“Ah, so you do know Uncle Chen! I’m his older brother’s only son, Huang Zitao,” the youth says with a bow. 

When he straightens up and smiles, Minseok can see it. The same dark, intense eyes. The same curled-up lips. But this boy has skin tinted only by the kiss of the sun rather than the creep of disease. 

“Kim Minseok. Nice to meet you.”

“It’s good to meet you in the flesh! But I thought Uncle’s crush was a greyling. It’s odd to see you without horns.” The curve of Zitao’s mouth holds no mockery, only fondness.

For a moment, Minseok is convinced he’s in a poppy dream, where healthy people discuss sick ones without pity. A dream world seems the only place such a conversation would occur.

“I was afflicted,” Minseok admits. “But there’s a cure. So I’m well now. Almost.”

“Ah. Well, congratulations, I guess. You were a really handsome grayling, though. No wonder Uncle couldn’t stop sculpting you. Er. For a while, anyway.”

Minseok hangs his head. “I’m sorry,” is all he can think of to mumble. 

Jongdae had responded readily enough when Minseok had kissed him, had wanted Minseok to come away with him. Minseok had run, and Jongdae had sculpted him anyway. Had he meant to show Minseok once he came back to the liquor house? Had he looked at the sculpture with anticipation, then finally shoved it to the back of the shelves, giving up on seeing Minseok again? Or had this been a memorial for one fallen, something made by a man mourning what could have been?

“He made another sculpture, of the both of you—it’s still in progress. I think it’s on this shelf—ah!” ZItao carefully removes the damp cloth from another piece, stepping back with a little grunt of surprise. Minseok shifts to see around the youth’s shoulder as he makes a sad little hum.

“I guess he wasn’t pleased with it,” Zitao says. “But if he meant to scrap it, I’m not sure why it’s still wrapped up on the shelf.”

The sculpture shows a couple side by side, arms wrapped around each other. One face is obviously Minseok’s, and haphazard scrape marks near forehead and lips seem to indicate his afflicted symptoms had been sculpted, then removed. Also removed was what appears to be the second figure’s original head. It’s lying on the wooden board between the two sculpted torsos, Jongdae’s handsome features half-squashed by the angle at which the head was evidently dropped. The new head, leaning forehead-to-forehead with the dehorned Minseok figure, is obviously meant to be Lu Han.

Looking at the wreckage and reformation makes Minseok feel more alone than being left by his lover to cry on his pallet by himself in the dark.

“Oh, Jongdae,” Minseok murmurs sadly, now-pale fingers hovering near the moist gray of the clay. It makes it worse somehow that the discarded head is so close in shade to Jongdae’s actual face. Minseok lifts his own face to meet Zitao’s wince.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him. I’d like to apologize, but I don’t know how to contact him. I imagine you do—”

Zitao laughs. “We live together. Sometimes we’re in more contact than I’d like.”

“Oh! May I leave a message with you, then?”

“You could just go talk to him yourself. He’s just upstairs—probably asleep. He tends to be a night owl. Something about all cats being gray in the dark.”

“Really? Oh, but I don’t want to disturb his sleep.”

“Trust me,” Zitao smirks. “I’m sure there’s nothing that Uncle would like more than his pretty little crush to crawl into bed with him.” He beckons Minseok through a door at the back of the storage area and points to a flight of stairs.

“I’m not going to—I just want to talk. To apologize!” Minseok protests, feeling his cheeks heat as he tries not to run up the staircase.

“I am not here to judge,” Zitao laughs. “Good luck!”

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	7. Sandstone

#  Chapter Six: Sandstone

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The apartment above the ceramic shop is modest but tidy, a single room containing everything a pair of bachelors needs to live a fairly comfortable life. There are two futon pallets placed side by side against the farthest wall from the stairs, large unshuttered windows allowing the midmorning sun to dance over the polished wooden floor. And on one of those pallets, dark hair gilded by sunlight, is a supine figure, chest bare and arms flung upward beside his head in sleep.

Jongdae is beautiful. It squeezes Minseok’s heart to see his face so peaceful after seeing it last twisted in a sneer. And evidently working with clay builds a man’s arms and tones his chest, unless Jongdae has some other physical pursuit to give him a body worthy of sculpture, himself.

But it’s impolite merely to stare at a sleeping man unaware of being watched, so Minseok clears his throat a little before softly calling Jongdae’s name. He has to try twice before he thinks to call him Chen, rousing the sleeping man into opening one eye and squinting up at Minseok.

Minseok suddenly feels very conscious of creeping into a man’s room as he slept. Zitao had better be right about his uncle’s ‘crush’ being welcome.

“Min?” Jongdae sits up, pulling the bedding up to cover himself. “What are you doing here?” He’s glaring at Minseok in a way that seems to call Zitao’s judgment into question.

Disappointment feels like a rock in Minseok’s chest. “I apologize for the intrusion. It seems I am less welcome than your nephew anticipated. I just wanted to apologize—we parted on sour terms and I regret it.”

Jongdae’s face darkens further, strong brows coming together over eyes snapping with cold. “Tao has overstepped if he let you up here. Did you bribe him? Hit on him? Blink those big kitten eyes up at him and pretend to be harmless?”

Minseok takes a step back. “Again, I am sorry. I intended just to leave you a message, but he seemed to think… well. It obviously doesn’t matter what he thought, since  _ you _ would evidently prefer I leave.”

Jongdae rolls his eyes, drawing attention to irises dark against an amber field. “I would, but I’d also prefer not to be ambushed on any future occasions. Just say whatever you need to make yourself feel better and then go.”

Shrinking into himself, Minseok just shakes his head. Why did he ever think this was a good idea? He wasn’t actually going to try to climb in bed with this man, was he? Luhan won’t ever touch Minseok again— _ can’t _ ever touch him again—but Minseok still owes him his loyalty. Or at least the honesty of informing him the lover whose life he saved is throwing it back in his face. 

“You’re right, as usual. Nothing I could say would be well-received, it would merely be assuaging my own guilt. My regret over how I treated you and over my own untenable situation does nothing to change the fact that I repeatedly treated you poorly and took advantage of you after you were so kind to me.” 

Moisture wells in his eyes at the realization that he only knows two people in all of Beijing, and neither one of them will give him the validation he craves. He may be the first ever successfully-treated gray agony patient, but he is still doomed; if not to death then at least to a life as cutoff from humanity as if he were a ghost, able to watch their happy, healthy lives but never able to touch, never able to truly belong.

“I’m sorry,” he says, forcefully swallowing the lump of sand in his throat. “You didn’t deserve that. I won’t bother you again.”

Minseok turns to go but only makes it a few steps before strong arms are wrapped around him from behind.

“Damn your kitten eyes,” Jongdae huffs. “Minseok, you don’t deserve any of this, either. It’s not your fault you have to make this weighty choice of how to live the rest of your life. And it isn’t as if I don’t want you here. But I won’t continue to be your mistake, Minseok. I don’t want you in my arms when you’re drunk, or out of your mind with pain, or addled by the poppy. I don’t want you as long as someone else believes they own you—as long as you believe yourself to belong to another.”

He squeezes Minseok’s shoulders and it’s enough to loosen the moisture from his eyes to run down his cheeks. “I can’t promise what the future holds for either of us. But if someday you’re free of pain and entanglements and my arms are still empty, you will be very welcome to walk back into them.”

Nodding, Minseok pats the back of Jongdae’s hand where it rests across his chest. And to save what little remains of his dignity, when Jongdae releases him, Minseok walks down the stairs and out of the ceramics shop without looking back.

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Minseok manages to keep it together enough not to run into anyone on his way home. And he has the presence of mind to lurk outside the apothecary shop, waiting for the customers he can see through the window to exit and discreetly ducking out of sight. Then when he’s sure Lu Han is alone in the shop, he lets himself back inside the building that is his sanctuary and his prison.

“You were right,” he tells someone for the second time that day. “I shouldn’t go out. I shouldn’t touch you or expect you to ever touch me. I should just sit in my accursed corner every day and sleep alone every thrice-damned night until I die of old age.”

Lu Han just gapes at him, any lingering upset shocked from his face by Minseok’s uncharacteristically coarse language.

At the limits of his control and once again feeling the effects of the poppy overwhelming that of the tea, he strips off his shoes with brusque, hateful movements, chucks them in the rack, and stomps upstairs, not even caring that he’s behaving like a child.

“Minseok,” Lu Han calls, evidently recovered from his stupor enough to follow him upstairs. “Min, my poor kitten. Was it too much for you? I don’t mean to stifle you, I just worry—you haven’t done much physical activity in the last few years. If you want to go on outings, we can work up to it! I’ll go with you—”

All the anger has drained out of Minseok, leaving only an aching sorrow. “That’s not necessary. You’re busy—you don’t need me making ridiculous demands on your time. You’ve already done so much for me. I don’t mean to be a burden.”

“You’re not a burden,” Lu Han says. “I love you. You’re my XiuXiuMinnie. I hate to see you so upset. I can’t bear to see you suffer.”

He hovers over Minseok as he settles himself into his protective silken nest—not protective  _ of _ him, but protective  _ from _ him. A beautifully-patterned quarantine. A lovely leper colony for one. A pretty, living tomb.

“It’s fine,” Minseok mumbles, arranging himself so he can gaze dully out the window at the world he’s no longer a part of. “I’m sorry for speaking harshly to you when you’ve only ever done your best for me.”

Lu Han caresses Minseok’s silk-covered head. “I will always do my best for you, my beloved. My precious kitten.”

Part of Minseok is irked at being called a fragile baby animal by both of the people he cares about. But most of him has decided not to care about anything anymore.

That night, the elixir tastes a little more bitter but Minseok doesn’t question it. Lu Han sits near his pallet and sings to him, evidently still fretting over Minseok’s excursion and subsequent tantrum. He must be really upset because he sings Minseok’s favorite, a sweet Joseon ballad, pronunciation almost perfect. Minseok’s last conscious thought is that he’s getting really tired of crying himself to sleep.

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The shadows in the bedroom are so strange when Minseok wakes that he’s not even certain that he  _ is _ awake for several long minutes. Lu Han’s pallet is empty, and Minseok can hear him humming that same Joseon ballad in the workroom.

Groggy, Minseok goes into the washroom, trying to scrub some wakefulness into limbs made of lead. Then he tries to assess himself but his eyes are drooping too much to really see much. It doesn’t seem important, anymore, anyway—the elixir is working. Minseok will remain well as long as he takes it.

He stumbles into the workroom just as the shop bell rings. Lu Han smiles softly at him before hurrying town the stairs to assist the customer, and Minseok trudges over to his nest. Outside the day is bright and the sun is more than halfway across the sky. It takes him several long moments to decide this is unusual, but by the time Lu Han comes whistling back up the stairs, Minseok has decided why he’s irked.

“You sedated me,” he accuses, voice slurred.

Lu Han blinks, leaning away from him in surprise. “Well, of course I did, Minnie. You gave me quite a scare yesterday and came home quite distressed. I can’t stand to see you like that, beloved. Isn’t it nicer to stay safe and cozy here with me where it’s safe?”

Minseok’s flash of anger grants him enough lucidity to express it. “It would be  _ nicer _ if you treated me like a full grown man! I am older than you, Lu Han—I don’t appreciate being managed like a child.”

“Well, you were certainly  _ acting _ like a child—what was I supposed to do? You weren’t yourself, darling. I worry.”

“I’m not myself because I’m infantilised by these accursed poppy tears! I am not actually an imbecilic kitten—grown men aren’t meant to sleep every damned day away!”

“I can put less poppy in the elixir if you insist on suffering, but Min—”

“I must  _ love _ suffering because I keep letting you guilt me into taking that accursed elixir when I don’t actually need to be ‘cured’ to keep my life!”

Lu Han is blinking at Minseok as if he’d just announced that murdering babies was the next item on his daily agenda. “Minseok, you promised! I kept my promise—I did the impossible for you! You can’t seriously want to give up now—my love, you’re my miracle.”

“You did keep your promise,” Minseok says. “You are undoubtedly the best apothecary in all the world. And I am incredibly honored that you worked so hard for me. But every day I spend as a living decoration in your workroom is a day that I’m not keeping  _ my _ promise.”

He shifts in his nest so he can focus better on the man he’s adored for half a decade. “Hannie. I love you. But I promised not to give up on myself. If I keep taking the elixir when it limits the life I’m able to lead, when it leaves me either writhing in pain or sleeping the hours away, isn’t that giving up? To just collect dust in a corner of your home forever?”

Minseok softens his voice. “And what are  _ you _ giving up, my love? Just so we can continue to live in this dream that died when the stoneblossom bloomed on my leg? Will you just take care of me forever like an actual kitten, pretty but useless? We cannot be together like we were, can we? Are we both condemned to loneliness? Or will you take a new lover and expect them to tolerate the living ghost of your old one?”

“I would never abandon you,” Lu Han vows.

“I know, Hannie,” MInseok smiles sadly. “So I’m going to have to do it for you. For both of us.”

It takes a lot of effort to gather some clothing and his few Joseon keepsakes and tie them inside a cloth. Partly because he’s so groggy from the lingering effects of the poppy and partly because Lu Han is crying like his heart is broken. It probably is. Minseok tries to offer him words of comfort, assuring him that he isn’t giving up, that he's doing this to give them both the best chance at a fulfilling life, but Lu Han just keeps repeating “you promised” in a small, broken voice.

Minseok feels a little bad that he doesn’t feel worse until he realizes that his own heart was broken a long time ago. He’s sure he still loves Han. A part of him always will. But as he dresses in his black hooded robe once again and exits the apothecary shop with his meager stock of worldly goods, all he feels is numb.

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	8. Obsidian

#  Chapter Seven: Obsidian

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Minseok once again ends up in the liquor house for lack of anywhere else to go. Jongdae had made it clear that Minseok needed to be fully sober before showing up at his door and Minseok is far from that. Head still swimming from the residual poppy, Minseok manages to nurse a single cup of huangjiu until dawn. 

Unfortunately, as the poppy wears off, Minseok’s anxiety level increases. What does he think he’s going to do? Where does he think he’s going to go? If he goes back to Lu Han, he is kissing any chance of a normal life goodbye. But if he doesn’t go back to Lu Han, isn’t he doing the same? How normal does he think his life will be once the symptoms return?

_ Jongdae is happy, _ he reminds himself. He has a job and a home and he is also a foreigner in this land. But he also has Zitao, family, people who will help him. Minseok, at the moment, has no one. And that’s entirely his own doing. If Minseok is truly declaring his independence, he’s going to have to take care of himself.

Leaving one of his few coins for the liquor master, Minseok sets out to find employment. It’s much harder than it had seemed—Minseok has no experience, his muscles are soft and weak after years of disuse, his scholarly credentials in Joseon mean nothing here. 

In addition, he can’t work in any sort of job where he’d interact with people—he has a pretty face at the moment, but that will soon change. He needs to work alone or at least out of the public eye. Preferably at night, if he must interact with coworkers. And he’s afraid to prepare food for fear of spreading the gray agony.

By the end of the day he’s no closer to finding employment or a place to stay. And the pain of the agony is coming back already—but not the all-over pain that he’s used to. No, this pain is sharp, stabbing, burning in his bones and teeth as they once again warp to the whims of the disease. 

Which may well be tolerable, if Minseok weren’t also sick.

He’s running a fever, chilled and sweating, dripping nose and watering eyes. And he can’t keep anything down—the second night he spends in the tavern, the drink he gives up another precious coin for is left on the table untouched when he drags himself away at dawn. His heart races like it had on the snow lotus, and he’s jumpy, twitching at every little movement or sound.

He catches himself going back to the apothecary shop whenever he tries to get it together enough to perhaps ask about some work—not that anyone’s going to hire him in this condition. Going back to Lu Han, letting him tuck him into bed, place a cloth over his forehead, dose him with some nasty concoction that will have him feeling better in a day or two, it all sounds so appealing. But he forces himself to sit down in an alley, gripping his knees with his hands, hood back so the sweat pouring off of him has some way to escape. Something in the alley is making a pathetic sort of groaning, and it takes him all morning to figure out that sound is his own voice. 

He’s not sure what would have happened to him if Zitao hadn’t literally stumbled over him.

“Minseok-ge? Why are you whimpering in an alley? Are you hurt? Sick? Let’s get you to a doc—”

_ “No.” _ Minseok pulls out of Zitao’s firm grip only because his skin is slick with sweat, ending up sprawled on the ground again. “This is my life. I will live or die on my own.”

Zitao frowns down at him. “Almost everyone would die if they were completely on their own,” he says. “Humans were not made to be alone.”

“It’s not safe for me to be with humans,” Minseok mumbles. “I’m contaminated. Maybe you are, too, since you touched my sweat.”

The lanky youth scoffs, leaning down and hoisting Minseok to his feet again, this time holding fistfulls of fabric over his biceps. “If you’re a greyling, your sweat is fine,” he dismisses. “And your spit—Uncle and I share dishes and cups all the time and I’m still tan instead of gray. We think it’s the blood that’s contaminated, and you’re not bleeding anywhere, are you?”

Minseok shrugs. He honestly doesn’t remember if he’d hurt himself. He hadn’t known about the cut that condemned him in the first place—he could be covered in wounds and not know it.

“Right. Well, Uncle would never forgive me if I just left his crush to sweat to death in the street so you’re coming home with me.”

“No,” Minseok protests, wounded by the memory of obsidian eyes. “Dae doesn’t want me until I’m healthy.”

“You’re not going to get any healthier lying on the ground. Come on—at least let me put you in a boardinghouse.”

“I can’t afford—”

“Minseok-ge, Uncle pays me well. And I live with him, so my expenses are few. I can afford to shelter a sick man for a few days at least. Please let me—”

Minseok thinks the boy keeps talking, but it’s not in a language he can understand. Minseok dreams that he’s flying, then that he’s swimming, then that he’s trying to throw up poison but can’t. He dreams that he’s dying and he’s so relieved that when he wakes up in a strange room on a strange pallet he’s downright disappointed.

Especially when the first thing he’s aware of is the all-pervading pain setting his bones aflame. 

“Ah, good, you’re awake. I do so hate to just leave someone unconscious on the street, but your pimp only paid for a week. I don’t judge anyone for selling what they can, but I won’t tolerate anyone working out of their room. This isn’t a bordello.”

Minseok lifts his head and struggles to bring the woman speaking to him into focus. She’s short, slight, yet has an aura of indomitability about her that makes him sure she could indeed drag him out to the street, especially considering Minseok’s current condition.

“I’m not a prostitute,” he asserts.

“That’s good, because you won’t have your looks for much longer,” the woman says, eying him appraisingly. “I give it a month before your horns are too big to hide beneath a cap.”

Minseok forces his body upright despite the pervading pain and the nausea rising up within him. “I’m sorry to trouble you,” he says through gritted teeth. “I have a few coins—”

“I already helped myself to your purse,” the woman says, no trace of shame on her noble face. “I don’t give sponge baths for free, nor do I let anyone soak in their own stink. Makes it harder to rent out the room.”

“I see. Thank you for caring for me.” Minseok stands, guilt at potentially exposing the woman to disease assuaged by a vague memory of someone telling him his sweat wasn’t contaminated. “As I have nothing left with which to pay you, I will cede this room to one who does.”

“Off to end yourself, then?”

Minseok shakes his head, concentrating on maintaining his balance. He has no idea what to do, but he’s not giving up the life he’s fought so hard for. He’s felt worse than this, far worse, and he trusts Jongdae’s assertion that the pain is temporary. His fever seems to have broken, leaving him hungover from dehydration and lack of food. He’s heard Lu Han coach people so often on how to care for their loved ones when they’re too ill to do it themselves, and this woman may have kept him clean—for which he is grateful—but he doubts she nursed him carefully on chicken broth and fruit juices like Lu Han would have done.

Lu Han.

The thought makes his heart ache along with his body. Evidently his former numbness was aided by the poppy tears which have long abandoned his transforming body. He could go back, he knows. He could go back, and Lu Han would take care of him, not only now, but for the rest of his life.

Yet Minseok will not return to captivity, even the loving, well-intentioned captivity Lu Han would provide.

“You have somewhere else to go?” the woman asks.

Minseok shakes his head again. He’s almost to the door, but even though the woman seems to know he’s afflicted, she doesn’t back away from him. 

“I run a business, not a charity,” she asserts. “But I’m not heartless. If you plan to live, you may as well stay here—you won’t find a cheaper boardinghouse that isn’t falling apart or riddled with rats.”

“I have no other funds,” Minseok reminds her. 

“You would if you got a job. And Yifan doesn’t care what his dock workers look like as long as they’re willing to work hard overnight.”

Minseok’s brows draw together. “Overnight?”

The woman nods. “Cargo ships like to leave on the morning tide, and Yifan prides himself on making sure they’re shipshape and ready to go. You seem sturdy enough to make a decent stevedore—oh, you’re a wreck now, but I figure you’re through the worst of it. The poppy is poison—now that it’s out of your system I’ll make you some willow tea to take the edge from your pain. Should be enough that you can tolerate being on your feet for a shift, especially seeing as you’re able to stand up without it already.”

“Pain is a familiar companion,” Minseok admits. “I have certainly endured worse—though I would not turn down willow tea.”

The bark of the tree helps with pain caused by swelling according to Lu Han, and if his current discomfort is caused by the shifting in his bones as Jongdae believes, the tea should give Minseok some relief, though it’s not a very strong effect.

But that’s fine—Minseok will be strong instead.

“You have seen my… condition before, then?” he asks, curious about the landlady’s nonchalance.

“Plenty. Two of my residents are greylings.”

“I see.” 

That makes sense, he supposes. He hadn’t ended up in this boardinghouse on his own—the woman’s comments imply someone paid for his room. If his hazy memories of Zitao aren’t fever dreams, it makes sense that the youth would deliver him somewhere that wouldn’t kick him out when his symptoms returned.

Filled with relief of having a place to stay and a plan to be able to afford it, Minseok offers as deep a bow as he can manage without ending up on the floor. “Thank you for your kindness, landlady. I’m Kim Minseok, and I am grateful for your merciful assistance.”

The landlady bobs a curt greeting in return. “Liu Yiyun. As I said, I’m running a business, and a full room pays better than an empty one, regardless of who’s in it. If your money’s good, what do I care what color you are?”

She gestures toward the bed with her chin. “You rest for now. I’ll wake you near sundown to eat with the others and have your tea. Then Han Geng can take you along with him when he goes to work.”

For the first time that he can remember, Minseok is happy to settle in to sleep the day away.

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	9. Slate

#  Chapter Eight: Slate

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Working at the docks is its own kind of agony at first, but Minseok pushes his underused body and his pain tolerance to cooperate with his iron will. It gets far worse before it gets better, leaving Minseok moving gingerly and sweating profusely, unable to move any but the lightest of burdens on or off the big-bellied cargo ships.

In addition to Han Geng, two of the other men assigned to his work crew are greylings. They assure Minseok that his suffering is temporary and that they don’t mind working a bit harder themselves until Minseok is able to keep up. Without that encouragement, throwing himself from the gangplank into the unforgiving sea would be a stronger call than that of the poppy, the dreams that interrupt his fitful sleep to say  _ why shed your own tears when those of the poppy can chase all your troubles away? _

During the worst of it, Minseok begs Landlady Liu to lock him in his room, making himself a temporary prisoner in order to avoid becoming a permanent one. She makes him tea and sings to him, voice husky and sweet, as she sponges sweat from brow and shoulders. Han Geng and the others cover for him at the docks for three nights before he manages to drag himself back to work, grayer than he’s ever been but in less agony than he’d been escaping the night he’d first seen Jongdae’s face.

Minseok would really like to see that face again soon. 

Every night Minseok performs a similar inventory to his former morning ritual, only this time he’s reassuring himself that the disease is progressing, that his visible symptoms are advancing. That he’s in a shade less pain than he’d been the night before. That he’s one day closer to being released from the pain of transformation completely.

While he waits, he takes up Han Geng’s invitations to socialize with the other greylings after his shifts, and Minseok’s eyes are opened to the seedy yet indiscriminate world of the docks after dark. Men of all skin complexions and manner of adornment frequent the liquor houses and other late-night establishments—next to such exotic hairstyles and clothing, those with grey skin and horned or hooded heads aren’t much of an oddity. Just as with the boardinghouse, the color of a man’s coins matters far more than that of his skin to these proprietors.

It’s a welcome novelty to sit beside other greylings openly in a liquor house and have a cup of cheap wine after his shift. Another to have unaffected men seated with them, entirely at ease. Minseok drinks with men from far-off lands whose languages he can’t begin to understand but who laugh just as hard at the clowning of fools. 

Minseok feels like a fool himself for ever believing himself to be the second ever survivor of the agony—of course there are affected people not wealthy enough to afford treatment, and some of them must have families to support. Minseok is sure Jongdae would never submit to such poking and prodding as the learned medical community would subject him to if he presented himself to them as a survivor, yet he had evidently let his 'secret' leak to those that same medical community often ignores for lack of coin. All the greylings Minseok has met either know Jongdae or know someone who does, someone who'd told them that total despair was unwarranted. They would suffer and be shunned but survive, and in the absence of certainty that death is on the doorstep, ending one’s own life becomes less of an option when other lives depend on it.

Jongdae may or may not be the first ever survivor, but he's evidently the first not to be ashamed of his redefined life. And while he may not be a man of tinctures and elixirs, he's saved lives in his own way by showing other afflicted ones it's possible to not only live but live well. It’s fairly common knowledge among the unwealthy, rumors spread by those who’ve been to the darker corners on dark nights and heard bright laughter from slate faces. An overwhelming percentage of those affected still choose death—Minseok himself had only managed to resist thanks to Landlady Liu's interventions. But more and more greylings seem to be choosing to endure the agony rather than succumb to the bone-rending pain. And, just as had his workmates on the docks, all the survivors treat each other as family, united by their ordeal.

Only in Minseok’s former world of silk and society does the disease still always spell death. But there are rumors about that, too, about an apothecary selling cures to the rich to save them from the fate of the poor. It’s not news for long, just another variation on how things have always been—the wealthy buy health and happiness while those without coin to spare are left to do without.

At least for Minseok, things are improving. The week he’s finally fit enough to earn the same wage as the rest of the crew, they all go out to celebrate, Minseok more than proud to buy his workmates a round of drinks. On the way home, he stops at an all-night pawn shop, picking up a few trinkets to thank Landlady Liu for her extra care.

“If you’d have given up, I’d have had the hassle of finding a new tenant,” she huffs, but she still accepts the jewelry and wears it frequently. Minseok pretends not to notice.

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Half a year after Minseok had staggered out of the apothecary shop and away from the man he’d loved, he finally wakes up one night completely without pain. He runs his nightly assessment, taking in his altered appearance without regret. His horns aren’t as long as those on the bust Jongdae had sculpted, but otherwise art has become life. And that art had been created by someone who’d wanted to kiss Minseok, hold him close.

Minseok can only hope that someone still wants to.

He’s still pain-free the next night, and the one after that. So after his shift, Minseok returns to his room at the boarding house and bathes himself carefully, dresses in one of his nicest changshan. And as the dawn breaks in the eastern sky, Minseok goes to visit the man to whom he owes so much. Lu Han had saved Minseok’s life, but Jongdae had shown him how to truly live.

A groggy Zitao answers to Minseok’s knock, sleepy face spreading into a welcoming grin. 

“Uncle!” he calls up the stairs. “I’m going to visit Yifan!”

“Wu Yifan?” Minseok asks, brows high.

“Yeah,” Zitao smiles. “We’re close. Uncle keeps pestering me to ask him about you. It’s been nice to tell him Yifan says you’re doing well, but even better to see the truth of it with my own eyes. You’re a far cry from the man I scraped out of an alley all those months ago.”

“I am,” Minseok confirms with his own smile. “If your uncle asks after me, do you suppose he’d like to see me, too?”

“Of course,” Zitao says with a chuckle, prodding Minseok toward the stairs. “Why do you think I’m going to Yifan’s? You lovebirds have fun.”

With a wink, the cheeky youth departs, leaving Minseok to gather his courage and climb the steps toward his future.

Jongdae is waiting for him, lit up like a sculpture himself by the gentle rays of the morning sun.

“Minseok,” he greets with a bow and a smile.

“Jongdae,” Minseok responds with the same. “You look… good.”

Jongdae smiles, dropping his gaze to his feet. They’re bare and gray and surprisingly tiny. It's ridiculously endearing.

“You look… healthy,” Jongdae returns. “It’s nice to see you out of pain.”

“It’s nice to be out of pain,” Minseok responds. “Thanks for that, by the way.” 

“You did all the work,” Jongdae dismisses. “But I’m really glad you did. You deserve it.”

Minseok nods, unsure what to say after the small talk dwindles. He rocks forward on his toes before thinking better of stepping closer. Jongdae has made no signals that he wants anything more from Minseok. He might even have someone else. He doesn’t owe Minseok anything, after all— 

“Why are you still over there?”

Minseok’s eyes lift from the wooden floor to Jongdae’s face. He’s wearing a smile that’s a little shy beneath eyes that are softer than Minseok’s ever seen them. And then Jongdae holds out a hand and Minseok needs no further invitation.

He must have taken three or four steps to cross the room but it seems like he’s instantly in Jongdae’s embrace, being held close by arms entirely undeterred by his body’s shape, kissing lips smiling around their own set of tusks.

“Min,” Jongdae sighs against his mouth with such reverence that Minseok can’t help but tear up. 

Minseok squeezes him tighter, closer, loving the lack of enveloping hoods, loving that he’s pressed near enough to feel the thump of Jongdae’s heart. Alive, just like he is. Alive and warm and beautiful, like having spring in his grasp after clawing his way through the longest winter.

“Dae,” Minseok answers. “Dae, I missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too,” Jongdae immediately replies. “Min, I’ve wanted you for so long.”

“You have me,” Minseok promises. “Oh, Dae, you have me—I want so much to be yours.”

“Then you’re mine,” Jongdae murmurs against his neck before returning to sucking hard at Minseok’s pulse point. “Let me be yours, too.”

“Please,” Minseok gasps, twining fingers into hair like black silk. “Dae. You’re gorgeous. Your arms. Your face—ah!”

“Don’t flatter me,” Jongdae chides, licking the spot he’d just bitten. “I have seen what your taste runs to. It’s enough for me that you can look past my face, that you are here with me by choice instead of desperation.”

“Of course being with you is my choice,” Minseok chides. “But there is truly nothing to look past. I’ve found you handsome since I first saw your face—sure, at first it was in spite of your affliction.”

“I am not—”

“I know,” Minseok laughs, cradling those lovely cheekbones and kissing Jongdae’s protest from his lips. “I know. You are only different, not disfigured. And I can no longer imagine this handsome face without these endearing tusks. Without these striking horns.”

He caresses one of the growths sweeping back from Jongdae’s forehead. Jongdae moans, dipping his chin and tilting his head to press the horn more firmly against Minseok’s palm. 

“Oh?” Minseok blinks at the surprisingly enthusiastic reaction, running his palm over the smooth surface of the tapered growth again. “Does it feel good when I touch you like this?” His own horns, still very small, don’t seem to have much sensation, but Jongdae’s are longer, thicker, curved up and back over his forehead in a graceful sweep.

“Oh, Min, yes,” Jongdae moans. “Not because they’re sensitive—you know they don’t really feel much. But because you’re not repulsed by them.”

Minseok frowns at the beautiful face in his hands. “I could never be repulsed by you, Dae. I—” He bites his lip over the words trying to tumble out and blushes. “I'm deeply fond of you,” he says instead, trying to meet Jongdae’s delighted gaze instead of looking shyly away.

He doesn’t have to fight for too long because Jongdae presses forward to kiss him again. Minseok lets his eyes close and concentrates on the sensation of Jongdae’s mouth on his, Jongdae’s arms around him, Jongdae’s throaty noises, Jongdae’s earthy scent.

Minseok follows eagerly when Jongdae pulls him down onto the sleeping pallet, only made hungrier by the thought that it’s the first time in years he’s lain by someone’s side. Jongdae’s hand slips under Minseok’s changshan to curve around his waist, thumb swiping over his stomach.

Suddenly Jongdae pulls away to blink at Minseok’s torso. “Min…” He pushes Minseok half onto his back to more easily run his hand over the skin beneath his tunic. “Minseok, what is this? What are you hiding beneath your handsome clothes?” He pulls his hand away only to fumble at the frog buttons.

“I don’t have any, er, transformations on my stomach—”

“Yes, you do. I held you close once before, Minseok. And  _ that _ body…” He succeeds in pulling off the changshan to expose Minseok’s torso. “Was not built of rippling roof tiles. Just  _ look  _ at this.” He caresses Minseok’s pecs, abs, the v-line disappearing into his undergarments. 

Minseok’s face relaxes into a smirk. “It was rather soft from sitting around all the time. But  _ this _ body has been hard at work on the docks, and I don’t eat such rich food anymore.”

“I can see that,” Jongdae hums. “I'm happy to see you so fit. For your health, of course, but also for my enjoyment.”

Minseok laughs. “Stop staring at me until you shed your clothing as well,” he chides. “Let me see you.”

“Oh, Min,” Jongdae purrs, chin tucked to his chest so he can look up at Minseok through those ridiculously long eyelashes. “I’m so fortunate to have a lover I don’t have to hide from.”

“As am I,” Minseok agrees, but then there’s no talking for several minutes as they work to free themselves and each other from their clothing.

Minseok stops short of removing his undergarment, suddenly shy even though the arousal tenting the fabric is mirrored by Jongdae’s own. Jongdae seems to have no such compunctions, but his fingers pause on the ties of his own undergarments, brows furrowing at what must be Minseok’s reluctant expression.

“We don’t have to be fully nude to enjoy each other, Min,” Jongdae says, releasing his undergarments to reach for Minseok instead. “Holding you and feeling your arousal is far more than I ever dared to hope for—”

“I want to be with you,” Minseok interrupts. “Fully. I am just afraid once you touch me, it will be over.”

Jongdae smirks into a kiss. “Ah, yes. My poor deprived Min is rather easy to please. I'm not much better, myself—but even if you reach your peak before I do, that needn’t deter us. We will help each other, enjoy each other, at whatever pace our bodies decide. It's our hearts I most look forward to sharing, anyway.”

Minseok would certainly rather kiss Jongdae than tear up. So he rolls him onto his back, intending to claim his mouth except Jongdae winces.

“Wait, Min—it’s better like this.” 

Jongdae wriggles until he’s lying directly over the joint between the two side-by-side futon pads and Minseok is both impressed and ashamed.

“Sorry—forgot about our spines. But this is nice—I thought our, ah... options were limited.”

Laughing, Jongdae pulls him down and kisses the awkwardness off of Minseok’s face. Minseok happily settles into the space Jongdae makes for him between his legs, moaning at the feeling of fingers gliding down his knobbed spine, over his spurred elbows, through his hair and over his horns. Jongdae even runs a thumb over his barely-protruding tusk, making Minseok smile as his heart melts. 

Emboldened by this acceptance of his body—perhaps even something akin to  _ appreciation— _ Minseok rolls his hips a little, drawing groans from both of their throats. 

“Min,” Jongdae chuckles. “If you do that I will definitely peak quickly.”

“As will I.” Minseok smiles wryly. “Yet I've decided I don’t mind. This isn't my only chance to enjoy pleasure with you, is it?”

“Far from it.”

“And an early peak, as you pointed out, does not equate to an early conclusion. I will take my pleasure, grant yours as well, and then continue to kiss you at leisure, pressure released.”

“I'm in favor of this plan.” Jongdae emphasizes his agreement by bucking his own hips up against Minseok’s.

Groaning with pleasure, Minseok responds with his own hips, rolling them rhythmically against the moaning man beneath him, loving the throaty sounds, loving the way Jongdae’s face scrunches. 

“Min, yes, oh,  _ Min,” _ Jongdae chants, one syllable per thrust, and the sensations in Minseok’s groin, while as explosive as a firecracker, are still secondary to the knowledge that Jongdae wants him like this.

Handsome Jongdae, so confident, who likely knows several people who’d be glad to have him in their beds and yet chose to wait for Minseok. Who touches Minseok as though he’s sculpted from the finest ceramic instead of being a shamefully-misshapen lump of clay. Who sculpted Minseok’s likeness as though he were beautiful, as though he were worthy of being immortalized as art.

“Dae,” Minseok pants, suddenly very overcome. “Oh, Dae—my dear, patient Dae!”

Jongdae’s arms tighten around Minseok and it's too much. Minseok closes his eyes, hips stuttering as he releases everything, pouring out his voice, his tension, his stoppered worries of rejection, of isolation, of unworthiness. And when Jongdae ruts up against him, hard, fast, insistent, like the pathetically-wailing man on top of him is the fuel for his desire, Minseok breaks. His wails shatter into sobs in unison with Jongdae’s groans of peaked pleasure.

“Min,” Jongdae soothes, rolling them onto their sides. “My Min, I'm right here with you. You're here with me, and it’s all right. It’s all right, and we are here together.” 

One arm is pinning Minseok’s torso close, the other hand is cradling his head against Jongdae’s shoulder. Jongdae just lets Minseok sob, murmuring reassurances as he howls away the pain and fear and shame he’d been harboring for the better part of four years. 

Being loved is an entirely different thing from being respected. Being wanted doesn’t correlate to being appreciated. Valuing a life isn’t the same as valuing the one living it.

Minseok will always be grateful to Lu Han for working so hard to save him. For making Minseok promise not to give up, even though he’d been tempted so many times. Lu Han was right—all the suffering was worth it in the end. Minseok treasures this chance to start again, to reclaim himself, to remember what it is to be alive. 

He treasures Jongdae, too, regardless of how it goes between them in the future. He likes Jongdae, with his darkly shining eyes and his ready smile. The way he lives his life unapologetically, forms connections despite his differences from most of the population, embraces the life he’s been given instead of enshrining what he’d had before. Minseok admires the man and probably always will, but he doesn’t  _ need _ him. Minseok has a strong, healthy body, a resilient, clever mind, and a renewed, undimmable spirit. He can survive with these things. Moreover, he can  _ thrive. _

It feels  _ so good _ to be desired. But it feels even better to be free.

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	10. Geode

#  Epilogue: Geode

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“Use only one sachet each morning and each evening. It will do more harm than good if administered too often.”

“Yes, Apothecary. Thank you.”

“Do you have any questions, grandmother? About this, or anything else?”

“Not at the moment, but we surely will come and ask if anything arises.”

“Please do. Go with good health!”

“Stay in good health, yourself. And thanks again!”

Lu Han smiles and waves at the elderly woman exiting the shop. She’s moving so much better these days and it fills him with pride to see it. He was initially attracted to apothecary because of the puzzle, the challenge of combining the right things in order to achieve the desired result. And he still enjoys the research and the experimentation, but now most of his joy in his career comes from witnessing the results in his client’s spirits as well as their bodies.

To see a man plagued by ague able to once again hold his poetry brush without shaking. To witness a young man’s recovery from a swelling on the leg, enabling him to work again—and the subsequent relief on the faces of his parents, who no doubt fretted about supporting themselves and their son and the possible end of their bloodline if he were unable to marry on top of their worry about their child’s health and happiness. 

Lu Han doesn’t just want to remove clinical symptoms. He wants to restore societal position. To minimize physical pain, of course, but also to maximize overall contentment.

His welcoming smile is extra sympathetic for the next pair to enter his shop. He knows all too well the expression of suppressed fear on the face he can see—and he’ll never forget the resignation and despair sure to be painted over the face shielded by a hood.

“The gray agony, is it?” he asks, voice as calm as it is when discussing arthritis or fever. “Please be comfortable, sisters. No need to hide in my presence.”

Trembling a little, the hooded woman pushes back her garment to reveal her face, only slightly ashen with the palest hint of yellow in her red-rimmed eyes. “Please, Apothecary. We have traveled far—we heard you have the cure.”

The other woman steps forward, proffering a bulky pouch. “We’ve brought all our valuables. If it’s not enough, we beg for credit. I can work, I will earn whatever is necessary.”

“I will not charge more than you can afford,” Lu Han assures them. 

There are enough vain, wealthy people paying for treatments to delay the effects of age or enhance pleasure or prowess. He lives a simple life without large expenses, has no family to care for, has no need of fancy clothing or overly rich food. 

There is no one in his life to impress anymore, after all.

“Thank you, gracious Apothecary,” the women say, bowing far more than necessary.

“Do not thank me yet,” Lu Han smiles. “I do have the ability to successfully treat the symptoms of the gray agony, that much is true. But it isn’t truly a cure—if the treatment is stopped, the disease will once again progress.”

He lifts a hand at their angst-filled noises. “However, you should understand that the gray agony isn’t painful forever. Once the disease has advanced sufficiently, the discomfort will subside. The body is still vital, though there are alterations to form and function.”

“It does not kill?” The once-hooded woman looks at him as if he were commanding devils in broad daylight.

“It does not kill,” Lu Han agrees. “Not directly. But many cannot accept the changes in appearance, or they cannot accept that their friends, family, or colleagues find their new physique unacceptable. So I do offer the treatment that will restore your original appearance, but the disease will still be present in the blood. It is still risky to engage in close association with a treated person. And the treatment itself brings pain akin to that of the advancing agony.”

The women are quiet for a moment, processing the information he’s imparted. 

“So… She can let the disease progress—turn gray, grow horns, spurs, and tusks—but eventually recover from the pain. Or she can undergo the treatment, reverse the symptoms, but must continue lifelong? And the treatment causes pain as well?”

“That is unfortunately the choice those with gray agony face. Before you decide, I strongly recommend you meet with a dear friend of mine and his partner. You can find them most days at Trollshead Stoneware in the market square. They’ll be the ones wearing hoods.”

The women gasp. “Are—are they…?” 

Lu Han nods. “My dear friend has been a greyling for just over one year, after enduring treatment for almost four. His partner has been a greyling for well over a decade. They will tell you honestly what treatment is like as opposed to living with the disease.” 

He escorts the couple to the door. “You don’t have to visit them, of course. But I will not sell you the elixir today. If you come back after thinking it over and ask me again, I will gladly provide you with the treatment—we will work out a fair payment, and I can refer you to places looking for employees if you choose to stay in town.”

The afflicted woman lifts her hood again before stepping outside but her companion pauses in the doorway, hand on Lu Han’s arm.

“But either way—whether she undergoes treatment or not—it’s possible for her to, er, pass on the disease?”

Lu Han gives her a sad little smile. “We still aren’t sure exactly how contagious it is or via what types of contact. But there is likely some degree of risk, perhaps lessened while on treatment, perhaps not. I do not want to give the illusion of surety when there is still so little data about how the condition is spread.”

“I understand,” the woman says, taking her hand back to herself. “Thank you for your honesty with us. You could easily have taken our money without any explanations.”

Lu Han shakes his head. “I can always make money elsewhere—people will always need remedies. But each of us only has one life—as a man dedicated to health, I would be incredibly remiss if I denied anyone the choice of how to spend their future.”

The women link hands as they stroll toward the marketplace. It will always make Lu Han’s heart twinge a little to lay out the choice he’d forced Minseok to make. But there’s no way he could live with himself if he didn’t.

He flips the sign on the door to CLOSED and returns to the counter, tidying up any stray ingredients or unpurchased remedies. The click of the door opening catches his ears as he’s counting his stock of pinellia tubers, ensuring he has enough for the phlegm-clearing decoctions that become popular this time every year.

“We’re closed,” he says without looking up.

“I understand that,” a gentle voice says, thick with a rural accent instead of the one that still haunts Lu Han’s dreams. “But the sign in the window says  _ help wanted, _ and I’m looking for a job?”

Forgetting all about the tubers, Lu Han stares at the man in the doorway. The setting sun lines his black hair and cream-colored changshan with red-gold. Even though he’s a man of logic, for half a heartbeat it seems to Lu Han that a beguiling fox spirit is smiling hopefully at him, dimples winking.

“Er, yes—please come in.” 

The stranger closes the door behind himself, cutting off the ethereal light before stepping up to the counter.

“I’m Lu Han, the apothecary here,” he introduces with a bow. “And who do I have the honor of meeting?”

“The honor is all mine,” the stranger says with an answering bow. “I’m Zhang Yixing. My father is a farmer but my mother was good with herbs. I don’t have much experience but I know willow bark from wormwood at least. I’d like to learn more about healing.” 

Lu Han smiles, feeling it reach his eyes for once. “It’s a lifelong pursuit, but well worth it. Every time I think I have it all figured out, I learn a little more about healing.”

#  <strike>⇳ ̥̊⪪</strike>​͜͡ⲟ<strike>⪫↕↕</strike>  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Endgame:** Minseok/Jongdae with implied Lu Han/Yixing. Minseok and Lu Han are friendly/on good terms, though! 
> 
> **Historical notes:**  
I loosely based the gray agony on leprosy, but obviously I took many liberties. The Traditional Chinese Medicine ingredients mentioned in the fic are/were actually used for those purposes, and there was indeed a huge opium addition problem at that time to the point where the emperor really did outlaw it. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
